Detection of Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics in Communities Using Joint Species Distribution Models

Biodiversity at the metacommunity scale is typically influenced by numerous environmental, spatial, biotic, and stochastic factors. These factors can simultaneously impact evolution in individual species, due to site-varying local selection pressures and the impact of connectivity for gene flow and genetic drift. Joint species distribution models (JSDMs) can estimate the relative impacts of environmental, spatial, biotic, and other drivers on community composition, but these models do not currently consider the impact of contemporary evolutionary change. We applied a JSDM to analyse simulated and experimental populations and communities that experience contemporary trait evolution. We found that it successfully partitioned variance contributed by environmental, spatial, and evolving phenotypic drivers, and also estimated site- and time-specific covariance. We further demonstrated how the model-estimated effect sizes of trait evolution for community composition can be used to test predictions about the underlying mechanistic drivers of eco-evolutionary dynamics in communities.