The interaction between spatial variation in habitat heterogeneity and dispersal on biodiversity in a zooplankton metacommunity

Highlights: • Source pool of dispersers was important to explaining community composition. • Local management marginally reduced compositional turnover among ponds. • Management practices may act as environmental filters, reducing beta diversity. • Management plans may have complex effects on biodiversity. It is hypothesized that biodiversity is maintained by interactions at local and regional spatial scales. Many sustainability plans and management practices reflect the need to conserve biodiversity, yet once these plans are implemented, the ecological consequences are not well understood. By learning how management practices affect local environmental factors and dispersal in a region, ecologists and natural resource managers can better understand the implications of management choices. We investigated the interaction of local and regional scale processes in the built environment, where human-impacts are known to influence both. Our goal was to determine how the interaction between spatial variation in habitat heterogeneity in algal management of urban ponds and dispersal shape biodiversity at local and regional spatial scales. A twelve-week mesocosm study was conducted where pond management and dispersal were manipulated to determine how spatial variation in habitat and dispersal from various source pools influence zooplankton metacommunities in urban stormwater ponds. We hypothesized that dispersal from managed or unmanaged source pools will lead to community divergence and local management practices will act as an environmental filter, both reducing beta diversity between managed ponds and driving compositional divergence. Our results suggest that zooplankton dispersal from managed or unmanaged source pools was important to explaining divergence in community composition. Furthermore, local management of algae marginally reduced compositional turnover of zooplankton among ponds but did not lead to significant divergence in community composition. Management practices may act as strong environmental filters by reducing beta diversity between ponds. As hypothesized, source pool constraints led to compositional divergence and local management practices resulted in reduced compositional turnover between ponds. The results of this study suggest that sustainability and management plans may have complex effects on biodiversity both within and across spatial scales.