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

Abstract

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.

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