Metacommunity theory in the marine environment: application to Marine Protected Area (MPA) design and managemen
My PhD research investigates the structure of marine fish communities across the Southwest Corner Marine Park in Western Australia, using metacommunity theory as a framework to better understand how environmental conditions, spatial processes, and biotic interactions shape the communities found within marine protected areas.
MPA monitoring and planning has historically focussed on rare, charismatic, or commercially important species, leaving community-level processes largely unaccounted for in spatial management decisions. Understanding how fish communities are structured, and how that structure changes through time, is directly relevant to MPA design and monitoring. The temporal stability of metacommunity processes is a particularly understudied area; most past studies have captured single snapshots of community structure rather than tracking whether the dominant assembly processes remain consistent or shift over time. My research attempts to addresses this gap by assessing fish metacommunity structure across both space and time in a large, connected marine system.
A second focus of the project is the internal structure of metacommunities. Community-level patterns, such as an apparent signal of strong environmental filtering, do not necessarily apply uniformly to every species or site within a system. By accounting for this internal variation, it becomes possible to identify multiple assembly processes operating simultaneously, and to determine which species and locations are driving broader community-level patterns.
To investigate these questions, I am applying Joint Species Distribution Models (JSDMs) within a Bayesian framework (HMSC), which can simultaneously partition environmental, spatial, and residual variation in species distributions while revealing interspecific associations. The broader aim is to develop a practical framework through which metacommunity theory can inform MPA design and monitoring in marine systems.
About Me
I was fortunate to spend my childhood in the Southwest of Ireland. The Atlantic Ocean was never far away and without internet surrounded by mountains, rivers, and bogs I naturally developed a love for ecology and the outdoors. However, I decided as a teenager that engineering would be a more “sensible” career prospect. I completed my undergraduate degree in aircraft engineering and spent several years working in the aerospace sector. I soon realised that life as an engineer did not excite me as much as ecology, so I returned to university completing a MSc in Environmental Sustainability at University College Dublin. I completed my thesis with the British Antarctic Survey investigating spatial and temporal changes in the diet of mackerel icefish (Champsocephalus gunnari) around South Georgia in the Southern Ocean. It was then I decided to look for PhD opportunities investigating community level processes at large scales in marine systems, with a focus on informing MPA management and planning, which has now brought me here to UWA.
Supervisors
Dr. Tim Langlois, Dr. Graeme Cumming, Dr. Steve Swearer
Contact
Indian Ocean Marine Research Centre
School of Biological Sciences (M470)
35 Stirling Highway, Crawley WA 6009
ennis.devos@research.uwa.edu.au
