Linking conservation biology to community assembly processes with hierarchical modelling of species communities

Applications in conservation biology require a profound understanding of community ecology, in particular of the processes that determine the assembly and dynamics of species assemblages at different spatiotemporal scales. To facilitate the integration between conceptual and statistical approaches in community ecology and conservation biology, we have developed Hierarchical Modelling of Species Communities (HMSC) as a general, flexible framework for modern analysis of community data (1,2,3). HMSC belongs to the class of joint species distribution models, and it makes it possible to derive simultaneously species- and community level inference from data on species occurrences, environmental covariates, species traits, and phylogenetic relationships. HMSC applies to a wide variety of study designs, including hierarchical data, spatial data, temporal data, and spatio-temporal data. I describe the general HMSC framework and discuss with examples how it helps making more out of data in the context of applications in conservation biology. 1. Ovaskainen, O., Tikhonov, G., Norberg, A., Blanchet, F. G., Duan, L., Dunson, D., Roslin, T. and Abrego, N. 2017. How to make more out of community data? A conceptual framework and its implementation as models and software. Ecology Letters 20, 561-576 2. Ovaskainen, O., Tikhonov, G., Dunson, D., Grøtan, V., Engen, S., Sæther, B.-E. and Abrego, N. 2017. How are species interactions structured in species rich communities? A new method for analysing time-series data. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 284, 20170768. 3. Ovaskainen, O., Roy, D., Fox, R. and Anderson, B. 2016. Uncovering hidden spatial structure in species communities with spatially explicit joint species distribution models. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 7, 428-436.