I achieved my aim to undertake a programme of research on the impact of environmental change on communities and have contributed to knowledge in this area of ecology. The novel time scales provided the opportunity to
drawn amongst marine and terrestrial environments, the difference in data from the two environments prevented fully parallel analyses, perhaps providing explanation for the lack of such analyses in the literature. Therefore, in addition to multi-disciplinary analyses, baseline data collection and monitoring must also become multi-disciplinary to enable cross-ecosystem comparisons in the future. However, despite limitations, I have presented a first attempt at the combination of ecosystems from terrestrial and marine environments within the same geographical area to investigate the impacts of environmental change.
This thesis has highlighted numerous avenues for future research. In the area of NACs, it would be very interesting to consider inter-specific interactions within their formation because this may explain the mechanism of formation and/or explain the lack of evidence for them within the woodland communities. The area of biotic homogenization would benefit from an investigation of whether indicator assemblages could provide a method for rapid assessment of beta-diversity loss because indicators are a current topic of great interest (UNEP-WCMC 2009).
Unfortunately, this thesis was not able to conduct analyses of limitations to plant dispersal owing to a lack of range boundary data. In particular it would be interesting to determine whether a similar pattern exists for plants whereby species that have short dispersal distances are more able to consolidate populations and therefore extend range boundaries. This would be a very useful result to inform bioclimatic envelope models. Further ideas for research are listed below but will not be expanded here:
• Determine whether biotic homogenization has occurred in marine environments through use of full community data, even if evidence must come from space for time substitutes
• Greater understanding of the mechanisms of biotic homogenization (using time series data)
• Identify dataset suitable for analysis of metacommunity structure in marine environment
• Establish parallel monitoring and surveying efforts for marine and terrestrial environments
• Synergistic effect of sea surface temperature rise and sea level rise on connectivity of rocky shore invertebrate species
In conclusion, this thesis adds to the growing call for consideration of impacts at the community level, inclusive of inter-specific interactions and individualistic responses in analyses of environmental change impacts.
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