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

We evaluate the roles of dispersal limitation and landscape features as drivers of differentiation within a single sky-island, by examining fine-scale community patterns of arthropod fauna at different hierarchical levels. To do this, we performed a systematic sampling consisting of 840 pitfall traps across Abies religiosa forests within Nevado de Toluca, a sky-island from the TMVB. We generated haplotype-level metabarcoding data for 42 arthropod communities distributed in sampling blocks separated from 50 m to 19 km, and evaluate patterns of richness, turnover, and distance decay in community similarity at multiple hierarchical levels (haplotype, putative species, and supra-specific levels). Our analytical framework thus allows us to assess the role of dispersal constraints, within a local landscape setting, on tropical mountain diversity.