Complimentary analysis of metacommunity nestedness and diversity partitioning highlights the need for a holistic conservation strategy for highland lake fish assemblages

Metacommunity nestedness can be affected by both idiosyncratic species and species turnover, and diversity partitioning allows one to separate turnover and nested components within β-diversity. Thus, complimentary analysis of metacommunity nestedness and diversity partitioning allows for the identification of the underlying changes at both local and regional scales. We examined changes of fish assemblages in metacommunity nestedness and α-, β-, and γ-diversities resulting from the intense loss of native species and the invasion of nonnative species in Chinese highland lakes over the past 60 years. We found metacommunity nestedness rose markedly over time, following the loss of both β- and γ-diversity resulting from the loss of native species, and the increase of α diversity by the addition of nonnative species. This pattern is contradictory to the selective extinction leading to larger nestedness in natural ecosystems and indicates the human-induced negative effects on the metacommunity. However, β-diversity partitioning showed that the turnover component due to species replacement among lakes still contributes more than the nested component, suggesting the importance of avoiding setting conservation priorities based exclusively on metacommunity nestedness theory, but taking a more holistic metacommunity-approach to conservation instead.