Biotic interactions are fundamental drivers governing biodiversity locally, yet their effects on geographical variation in community composition (i.e. incidence‐based) and community structure (i.e. abundance‐based) at regional scales remain controversial. Ecologists have only recently started to integrate different types of biotic interactions into community assembly in a spatial context, a theme that merits further empirical quantification. Here, we applied partial correlation networks to infer the strength of spatial dependencies between pairs of organismal groups and mapped the imprints of biotic interactions on the assembly of pond metacommunities. To do this, we used a comprehensive empirical dataset from Mediterranean landscapes and adopted the perspective that community assembly is best represented as a network of interacting organismal groups. Our results revealed that the co‐variation among the beta diversities of multiple organismal groups is primarily driven by biotic interactions and, to a lesser extent, by the abiotic environment. These results suggest that ignoring biotic interactions may undermine our understanding of assembly mechanisms in spatially extensive areas and decrease the accuracy and performance of predictive models. We further found strong spatial dependencies in our analyses which can be interpreted as functional relationships among several pairs of organismal groups (e.g. macrophytes–macroinvertebrates, fish–zooplankton). Perhaps more importantly, our results support the notion that biotic interactions make crucial contributions to the species sorting paradigm of metacommunity theory and raise the question of whether these biologically‐driven signals have been equally underappreciated in other aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Although more research is still required to empirically capture the importance of biotic interactions across ecosystems and at different spatial resolutions and extents, our findings may allow decision makers to better foresee the main consequences of human‐driven impacts on inland waters, particularly those associated with the addition or removal of key species.

中文翻译：

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生物互动是理解元社区组织的关键

生物相互作用是当地治理生物多样性的基本驱动力，但在区域规模上它们对社区组成（即基于发病率）和社区结构（即基于丰度）的地理变异的影响仍然存在争议。生态学家直到最近才开始在空间环境中将不同类型的生物相互作用整合到社区中，这一主题值得进一步的经验量化。在这里，我们应用了部分相关网络来推断成对的生物群之间空间依赖性的强度，并将生物相互作用的烙印映射到池塘亚群落的装配上。去做这个，我们使用了来自地中海景观的综合经验数据集，并采用了将社区集会最好地表示为相互作用的有机体网络的观点。我们的结果表明，多个有机体群体的β多样性之间的共变主要是由生物相互作用驱动的，而在较小程度上是由非生物环境驱动的。这些结果表明，忽略生物相互作用可能会破坏我们对空间广泛区域中组装机制的理解，并降低预测模型的准确性和性能。我们在分析中进一步发现了强烈的空间依赖性，这可以解释为几对生物体之间的功能关系（例如大型植物－大型无脊椎动物，鱼类－浮游动物）。也许更重要的是 我们的研究结果支持了以下观点：生物相互作用对元群落理论的物种分类范式做出了重要贡献，并提出了以下问题：这些生物驱动信号是否在其他水生和陆地生态系统中同样被低估了。尽管仍需要进行更多的研究以从经验上把握整个生态系统之间以及在不同的空间分辨率和程度下生物相互作用的重要性，但我们的发现可能使决策者更好地预见到人类驱动的内陆水域影响的主要后果，特别是与内陆水域相关的影响。添加或删除关键物种。