In situ resistance, not immigration, supports invertebrate community resilience to drought intensification in a Neotropical ecosystem

While future climate scenarios predict declines in precipitations in many regions of the world, little is known of the mechanisms underlying community resilience to prolonged dry seasons, especially in “naïve” Neotropical rainforests. Predictions of community resilience to intensifying drought are complicated by the fact that the underlying mechanisms are mediated by species’ tolerance and resistance traits, as well as rescue through dispersal from source patches.

We examined the contribution of in situ tolerance-resistance and immigration to community resilience, following drought events that ranged from the ambient norm to IPCC scenarios and extreme events.

We used rainshelters above rainwater-filled bromeliads of French Guiana to emulate a gradient of drought intensity (from 1 to 6 times the current number of consecutive days without rainfall), and we analyzed the post-drought dynamics of the taxonomic and functional community structure of aquatic invertebrates to these treatme...