Meta-Community Theory Applied to Weed Community Assembly in Nigerian Agricultural Landscapes: Implications for Sustainable Weed Management

This study applies meta-community theory to understand weed community assembly processes in Nigerian agricultural landscapes, generating novel ecological insights that inform sustainable weed management strategies. Meta-community theory, which examines how regional processes including dispersal, environmental filtering, and species interactions jointly determine local community composition, has been applied extensively in natural ecosystems but rarely in agricultural weed ecology. Understanding whether weed communities in Nigerian farming landscapes are primarily structured by environmental filtering, mass effects from seed dispersal, or neutral processes is essential for predicting weed community response to management changes. This study uses a spatially stratified weed community dataset collected from 240 farm plots across three agricultural landscape gradients in Ogun, Kaduna, and Benue States, representing gradients of management intensity, landscape heterogeneity, and climate. Weed community beta-diversity is partitioned into species replacement and richness difference components. Variation partitioning separates the contributions of environmental (soil, climate, management) and spatial factors (dispersal-mediated) to community composition. Metacommunity analysis uses the Elements of Metacommunity Structure framework. Findings reveal that weed community composition across Nigerian landscapes is primarily structured by species sorting along environmental gradients, particularly soil phosphorus and tillage intensity, rather than neutral dispersal dynamics. Landscape heterogeneity significantly buffers weed diversity, maintaining higher beta-diversity across heterogeneous versus homogeneous agricultural landscapes. The study contributes an original metacommunity framework for Nigerian weed ecology and recommends landscape-scale weed management planning that considers regional seed dispersal sources alongside field-level management.

Keywords: metacommunity theory, weed community assembly, agricultural landscapes, beta-diversity, Nigeria.