Biodiversity change across time and space in the Anthropocene: Leveraging metacommunity modelling, land-use change, and open data to achieve deeper understanding

Introduction

Despite connections between metacommunity level processes that maintain biodiversity and anthropogenic pressures that erode those processes, these have not been well integrated. I propose a multifaceted approach that:

1. Builds on metacommunity theory to develop expectations for the influence of anthropogenic drivers on scale-explicit biodiversity change.
2. Uses this theory to develop an analytical pipeline to disentangle local and landscape factors driving this change.
3. Uses the derived results to develop scale-explicit projections of future biodiversity change that can aid biodiversity policy decisions.

Methodology

With theoretical expectations and analytical procedures in hand, we will synthesize biodiversity change across scales, and the relative influence of local versus landscape-level drivers on those changes.

Analytical Pipeline Application

We will apply our analytical pipeline to the largest compilation of metacommunity time series to provide a comprehensive analysis of biodiversity change. We will complement this with a data collection campaign to ‘resurvey’ zooplankton metacommunities from ponds that had been surveyed 10-50 years previously, but which have experienced different levels of background ‘change’ (e.g., loss of nearby habitat).

Database Compilation

We will also compile a database to explore the potential influence of habitat restoration via local and landscape processes, and its influence on scale-explicit biodiversity change. We will analyze these synthetic datasets together with geospatial driver data using our novel analytical pipeline.

Projections of Biodiversity Change

Finally, we will develop a unique pipeline integrating metacommunity theory with our synthetic results and machine learning to develop projections of biodiversity change in the face of scenarios of anthropogenic change.

Conclusion

With the information gained, we will contribute not only to a better understanding of the most important feature of life on this planet—its biodiversity—but by developing this understanding, we can provide an avenue to mitigate the changes.