Nested Patterns of Species Composition and Their Implications for Lemur Biogeography in Madagascar

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Abstract
Many communities with a common biogeographic history show a non-random pattern of species composition. When occupying similar habitats, communities with fewer species tend to represent nested subsets of communities with more species. Nestedness can come about by successive extinction of species from communities derived from a common species pool, or when species from the original species pool have different colonization abilities. In the first case extinction depends on site characteristics, but is independent of geographical location. In the second case, communities at sites close to the original species pool have more species in common with the original species pool than do more distant communities. The communities of evergreen rain forest lemur species in eastern Madagascar show a highly nested pattern, but there is no distance effect of species similarity among communities. This finding is consistent with the idea of a common species pool for the whole of eastern Madagascar, with selective extinction during fragmentation of forest during the Pleistocene. In contrast, the communities of dry deciduous forest lemur species in western Madagascar show a strong distance effect of species similarities, but show nested patterns only when the dataset is subdivided into northern and southern community subsets. This indicates a common pool of dry forest species which originated around Toliara and from there spread towards the north and the south.

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