Evaluation of the effect of including juveniles on community
patterns
In the adult-based NMDS (Fig. 4a) the distances between the communities
of the same park were generally lower than the distances between the
parks. This ordination showed a clear separation between northern
communities and southern communities along the first component. The NMDS
performed including individuals of all life stages (Fig. 4b) did not
show a clear north-south distinction, and the parks were less
homogeneous than in the NDMS based on adults. The Mantel test revealed
that the correlation between the two distance matrices was significantly
low (r = 0.336, p = 0.004). There were significant differences between
the species composition of northern and southern communities with the
dataset containing only adult species (R=0.944, p=0.0005), but not with
the dataset including juveniles (R=0.136, p=0.078).