Dispersal limitations and long-term persistence drive differentiation from haplotypes to communities within a tropical sky-island: evidence from community metabarcoding

Neutral theory proposes that dispersal stochasticity is one of the main drivers of local diversity. Haplotypes-level genetic variation can now be efficiently sampled from across whole communities, thus making it possible to test neutral predictions from the genetic to species-level diversity, and higher. However, empirical data is still limited, with the few studies to date coming from temperate latitudes. Here, we focus on a tropical mountain within the Transmexican Volcanic Belt to evaluate spatially fine-scale patterns of arthropod community assembly to understand the role of dispersal limitation and landscape features as drivers of diversity. We sampled whole-communities of arthropods for eight orders at a spatial scale ranging from 50 m to 19 km, using whole community metabarcoding. We explored multiple hierarchical levels, from individual haplotypes to lineages at 0.5, 1.5, 3, 5, 7.5% similarity thresholds, to evaluate patterns of richness, turnover, and distance decay of similari...