ArticleMolecular ecology2025
Metacommunity Theory and Metabarcoding Reveal the Environmental, Spatial and Biotic Drivers of Meiofaunal Communities in Sandy Beaches.
Article in Molecular ecology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Understanding the processes that shape community assembly is a critical focus of ecology. Marine benthic meiofauna, microscopic invertebrates inhabiting sediment environments, play important roles in ecosystem functioning but have been largely overlooked in metacommunity studies due to the lack of community data. In this study, we quantify the relative contributions of environmental filtering, spatial processes, and biotic associations in structuring meiofaunal communities. We applied Generalised Dissimilarity Modelling (GDM) and Joint Species Distribution Modelling (JSDM) to an extensive metabarcoding dataset comprising 550 samples collected from sandy beaches along over 650 km of the Dutch and German North Sea coast. Our findings reveal that biotic associations, followed by environmental factors, particularly the distance from the low tide line and sediment grain size, are primary drivers of meiofauna community turnover, highlighting the influence of sharp environmental gradients. Spatial factors indicating dispersal limitations have no major impact on community composition, supporting the assumption that microscopic organisms have strong dispersal capabilities. JSDM results demonstrate that while species sorting is a key driver of community assembly, environmental factors are most important in environmentally distinct ('extreme') sites, whereas biotic associations significantly shape community assembly in both environmentally similar and dissimilar habitats, emphasising the need to incorporate species interactions into models of community assembly. By providing insights into the drivers of meiofaunal community structure, our study highlights the importance of environmental gradients and biotic associations in shaping biodiversity patterns and underscores the potential for similar approaches to enhance understanding of other ecosystems with small, highly diverse, but understudied taxa.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.