Mapping planktonic communities: a network approach to assess the role of scale and centrality on their diversity and composition

The distribution of habitats across a landscape and their centrality gradient are key elements defining the effective pathways of dispersal, and thus of metacommunity assembly. Understanding how centrality shapes diversity patterns is essential for predicting the impact of future landscape changes on diversity. While alpine lakes have been extensively studied, often considering the fluvial network as a potential landscape, small planktonic communities have frequently been overlooked as potential dispersers due to their assumed ubiquity. In this study, we investigate the diversity patterns of alpine lake planktonic communities along lake networks constructed at different scales, ranging from 6.5 to 650 km and the fluvial network. We sampled 55 lakes in the northern Alps (16S, 18S, phytoplankton and zooplankton) and calculated several diversity metrics (alpha, beta diversity and LCBD) and multivariate analysis. We then constructed several networks responding to different scales, determined their centrality gradients, and finally explored their relationship with the diversity of each planktonic group. We expected that a groups' diversity would relate differently across scales based on body size, but the outcomes were varied. Bacterioplankton and zooplankton diversity were both affected across scales higher than 100 km, whereas phytoplankton appeared completely unrelated to centrality. Nonetheless, we could observe that when significant, the relationships between diversity and centrality were shared among organisms. These findings not only underscore that planktonic organisms are influenced by landscape configurations larger than the fluvial system but also emphasise the critical role of dispersal for these groups and the scales at which it impacts metacommunity assembly. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.