Assessing metacommunity processes through signatures in spatiotemporal turnover of community composition

Although metacommunity ecology has been a major field of research in the last decades, with both conceptual and empirical outputs, the analysis of the temporal dynamics of metacommunities has only emerged recently and still consists mostly of repeated static analyses. Here we propose a novel conceptual framework to assess metacommunity processes using path analyses of spatial and temporal diversity turnovers. We detail the principles and practical aspects of this framework and apply it to four datasets to illustrate its ability to decipher the respective contributions of entangled drivers of metacommunity dynamics. Empirical results support the view that metacommunity dynamics may be generally shaped by multiple ecological processes acting in concert, with environmental filtering being variable across both space and time.