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).