Large-scale multi-trophic co-response models and environmental control of pelagic food webs in Québec lakes

Environmental heterogeneity plays a fundamental role in driving species distributions by, for one, fostering niche dimensionality. Within lake ecosystems, species distributions and concordance patterns are driven by both local and regional heterogeneity, though their relative importance across trophic levels has rarely been explored. We developed a statistical framework to compare responses of taxa from different trophic levels to abiotic factors and determine how thisaffected multi-trophic network structures.In particular, we used multi-species concordance modelling (Concordance Analysis and RV coefficient) to determine species associations and correlations within and among three trophic levels (phytoplankton, zooplankton and fish communities sampled across 49 southern Québeclakes, covering eight hydrological regions). We then used Multiple Factor Analysis, Latent Variable Modelling and Local Contributions of sites to Beta Diversity to assess the relative importance of major environmen...