A simple description of temporal dynamics of ecological communities may help us understand how community assembly proceeds, predict ecological responses to environmental disturbances, and improve the performance of biological conservation actions. Although community changes take place at multiple temporal scales, the variation of species composition and richness over time across communities and habitats shows general patterns that may potentially reveal the main drivers of community dynamics. We used the simplest stochastic model of Island Biogeography to propose two quantities to characterize community dynamics: the community characteristic time, as a measure of the typical time scale of species richness change, and (ii) the characteristic Jaccard index, as a measure of temporal β diversity, i.e., the variation of community composition over time. In addition, the community characteristic time, which sets the temporal scale at which null, non-interacting species assemblages operate, allowed us to define a relative sampling frequency (to the characteristic time). Here we estimate these quantities across microbial and macroscopic species assemblages to highlight two related results. First, we illustrated both characteristic time and Jaccard index and their relation with classic time-series in ecology, and found that the most thoroughly sampled communities, relative to their characteristic time, presented the largest similarity between consecutive samples. Second, our analysis across a variety of habitats and taxa show that communities span a large range of species turnover, from potentially very fast (short characteristic times) to rather slow (long characteristic times) communities. This was in agreement with previous knowledge, but indicated that some habitats may have been sampled less frequently than required. Our work provides new perspectives to explore the temporal component in ecological studies and highlights the usefulness of simple approximations to the complex dynamics of ecological communities.

中文翻译：

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生态群落特征时间

对生态群落时间动态的简单描述可以帮助我们了解群落组装的过程，预测生态对环境干扰的反应，并提高生物保护行动的绩效。尽管群落变化发生在多个时间尺度，但群落和栖息地的物种组成和丰富度随时间的变化显示出可能揭示群落动态主要驱动因素的一般模式。我们使用最简单的岛屿生物地理学随机模型提出两个量来表征群落动态：群落特征时间，作为物种丰富度变化的典型时间尺度的度量，以及 (ii) 特征 Jaccard 指数，作为时间的度量β多样性，即群落组成随时间的变化。此外，群落特征时间设置了空的、非相互作用的物种组合运行的时间尺度，允许我们定义相对采样频率（到特征时间）。在这里，我们估计微生物和宏观物种组合的这些数量，以突出两个相关结果。首先，我们说明了特征时间和Jaccard指数以及它们与生态学经典时间序列的关系，发现最彻底采样的社区，相对于它们的特征时间，连续样本之间的相似度最大。其次，我们对各种栖息地和分类群的分析表明，群落的物种周转范围很广，从可能非常快（特征时间短）到相当慢（特征时间长）的群落。这与先前的知识一致，但表明某些栖息地的采样频率可能低于要求。我们的工作为探索生态研究中的时间成分提供了新的视角，并强调了简单近似对生态群落复杂动态的有用性。