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Week 11: Community Composition Across Space

Core Questions

  • How can multispecies community composition be represented spatially?
  • Where does community composition change most rapidly across geographic space?
  • How do turnover, nestedness, and distance decay describe beta diversity?

Concepts

  • Site-by-species matrices.
  • Beta diversity.
  • Bray-Curtis and Jaccard dissimilarity.
  • Community turnover and nestedness.
  • Distance-decay relationships.
  • Community composition across space.

Python Tools

  • pandas.
  • scipy.
  • scikit-learn.
  • GeoPandas.

Applied Lab

Students calculate community dissimilarity among sites, map spatial turnover, and test a distance-decay relationship between community dissimilarity and geographic distance.

Deliverable

Submit a community composition analysis with a site-by-species matrix, dissimilarity metric, map, and distance-decay figure.