The relative importance of the different processes that determine the distribution of species and the assembly of communities is a key question in ecology. The distribution of any individual species is affected by a wide range of environmental variables as well as through interactions with other species; the resulting distributions determine the pool of species available to form local communities at fine spatial scales. A challenge in community ecology is that these interactions (e.g. competition, facilitation, etc.) often are not directly measurable. Here, we used hierarchical modelling of species communities (HMSC), a recently developed framework for joint species distribution modelling, to estimate the role of biotic effects alongside environmental factors using latent variables. We investigate the role of these factors determining species distributions in communities of Artiodactyla, Perissodactyla and Proboscidea in the Afrotropics, an area of peak species richness for hoofed mammals. We also calculate pairwise trait dissimilarity between these species, from a mixture of morphological and behavioural traits, and investigate the relationship between dissimilarity and estimated residual co‐occurrence in the model. We find that while ungulate distributions appear to be predominantly determined (~ 70%) by climatic variables, such as precipitation, a substantial proportion of the variance in ungulate species distributions (~ 30%) can also be attributed to modelled latent variables that likely represent a combination of dispersal barriers and biotic factors. Although we find only a weak relationship between residual co‐occurrence and trait dissimilarity, we suggest that our results may show evidence that biotic factors, likely influenced by historical barriers to species dispersal, are important in determining species communities over a continental area. The HMSC framework can be used to provide insight into factors affecting community assembly at broad scales, and to make more powerful predictions about future species distributions as we enter an era of increasing impacts from anthropogenic change.

中文翻译：

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使用联合物种分布模型来识别非洲热带有蹄类动物分布的气候和非气候驱动因素


决定物种分布和群落聚集的不同过程的相对重要性是生态学中的一个关键问题。任何单个物种的分布都受到广泛的环境变量以及与其他物种相互作用的影响；由此产生的分布决定了可在精细空间尺度上形成当地群落的物种库。群落生态学的一个挑战是这些相互作用（例如竞争、促进等）通常无法直接测量。在这里，我们使用物种群落层次模型（HMSC），这是一种最近开发的联合物种分布模型框架，利用潜在变量来估计生物效应和环境因素的作用。我们研究了这些因素在决定非洲热带地区偶蹄类、奇蹄类和长鼻类群落物种分布中的作用，该地区是有蹄类哺乳动物物种丰富度最高的地区。我们还从形态和行为特征的混合中计算这些物种之间的成对特征差异，并研究模型中差异与估计剩余共现之间的关系。我们发现，虽然有蹄类动物的分布似乎主要由气候变量（例如降水量）决定（约 70%），但有蹄类动物物种分布的很大一部分方差（约 30%）也可归因于可能代表扩散障碍和生物因素的结合。 尽管我们发现残余共现和性状差异之间的关系很弱，但我们认为我们的结果可能表明生物因素（可能受到物种传播历史障碍的影响）对于确定大陆地区的物种群落很重要。 HMSC 框架可用于深入了解影响大范围群落组装的因素，并在我们进入人为变化影响日益加大的时代时对未来物种分布做出更强有力的预测。