Understanding the ecological processes that structure fish communities across different spatial scales is a central goal of marine community ecology. Metacommunity theory provides a framework for identifying the relative contributions of environmental filtering, biotic interactions, and dispersal in shaping community composition, yet empirically disentangling these processes remains methodologically challenging. Traditional approaches such as Redundancy Analysis (RDA) and variance partitioning offer a useful but incomplete picture, lacking the ability to explicitly account for residual species co-occurrence patterns after environmental effects are removed.
Joint Species Distribution Models (JSDMs) address this gap by simultaneously estimating species-environment relationships and residual inter-specific correlations that may reflect biotic and dispersal-driven processes. Here, we present a proof-of-concept evaluation of JSDMs using simulated community data, contrasting their performance against RDA and variance partitioning across different metacommunity scenarios. We then apply JSDMs to marine fish assemblages in the South-west Corner Marine Park to explore the processes structuring fish communities.
This work demonstrates the utility of JSDMs as a tool for advancing empirical metacommunity research in the marine environment, with the potential to provide insights on marine community structuring relevant to the design of marine protected areas.