Maria Ingimarsdottir

Primary assembly of soil communities: disentangling the effect of dispersal and local environment

It has long been recognised that dispersal abilities and environmental factors are important in shaping invertebrate communities, but their relative importance for primary soil community assembly has not yet been disentangled. By studying soil communities along chronosequences on four recently emerged nunataks (ice-free land in glacial areas) in Iceland, we replicated environmental conditions spatially at various geographical distances. This allowed us to determine the underlying factors of primary community assembly with the help of metacommunity theories that predict different levels of dispersal constraints and effects of the local environment. Comparing community assembly of the nunataks with that of non-isolated deglaciated areas indicated that isolation of a few kilometres did not affect the colonisation of the soil invertebrates. When accounting for effects of geographical distances, soil age and plant richness explained a significant part of the variance observed in the distribution of the oribatid mites and collembola communities, respectively. Furthermore, null model analyses revealed less co-occurrence than expected by chance and also convergence in the body size ratio of co-occurring oribatids, which is consistent with species sorting. Geographical distances influenced species composition, indicating that the community is also assembled by dispersal, e.g. mass effect. When all the results are linked together, they demonstrate that local environmental factors are important in structuring the soil community assembly, but are accompanied with effects of dispersal that may “override” the visible effect of the local environment.

Corridor or drift fence? The role of medial moraines for fly dispersal over glacier

Corridors are often considered to promote dispersal between habitat patches. In this paper, we study whether or not corridors induce colonisation of nunataks (ice-free areas in glacier surroundings) by promoting dispersal from lowland to the nunataks. On outlet glaciers, debris originating from nunataks forms the so-called medial moraines that stretch from the nunataks down-glacier to the lowland, forming corridors of debris on the glacier. Aerial dispersal was determined with yellow sticky traps on the moraines, bare glacier and glacier foreland. Dipterans were sampled in pitfall traps on the nunataks. Flying insects that were present on the vegetated glacier foreland belonged to five orders, that is, Diptera, Hemiptera, Hymenoptera, Lepidoptera and Trichoptera. On the glacier and medial moraines, however, mainly dipterans were present, with the majority of individuals found on the moraines. Hoverflies (Syrphidae) were abundant on the moraines and on the edges of nunataks close to the moraines, but were not present on the vegetated foreland. The origin of the hoverflies is thus not the nunataks and not the lowland. Rather, they are brought in by air currents towards the glacier, where they aggregate on a land type where they have a chance of survival, although it is not habitable. Thus, we conclude that the medial moraines do not function as regular corridors but as drift fences that direct the dispersal towards the adjacent land types, that is, the nunataks and the glacier foreland.