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Metacommunity Theory and Metabarcoding Reveal the Environmental, Spatial and Biotic Drivers of Meiofaunal Communities in Sandy Beaches

Understanding the processes that shape community assembly is a critical focus of ecology. Marine benthic meiofauna, microscopic invertebrates inhabiting sediment environments, play important roles in ecosystem functioning but have been largely overlooked in metacommunity studies due to the lack of community data. In this study, we quantify the relative contributions of environmental filtering, spatial processes, and biotic associations in structuring meiofaunal communities. We applied Generalised Dissimilarity Modelling (GDM) and Joint Species Distribution Modelling (JSDM) to an extensive metabarcoding dataset comprising 550 samples collected from sandy beaches along over 650 km of the Dutch and German North Sea coast. Our findings reveal that biotic associations, followed by environmental factors, particularly the distance from the low tide line and sediment grain size, …

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