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Journal ArticleDOI

A quantitative analysis of species sorting across organisms and ecosystems

Janne Soininen
- 01 Dec 2014 - 
- Vol. 95, Iss: 12, pp 3284-3292
TLDR
A quantitative review to determine if the degree of species sorting by the abiotic environment varied predictably between organism types and ecosystems concluded that SS was quantified as the relative fraction of community variation that is explained by environmental variables.
Abstract
The estimation of the relative roles of environment, space, and their interactions in structuring community composition is one of the central topics of community ecology. I conducted a quantitative review to determine if the degree of species sorting (SS) by the abiotic environment varied predictably between organism types and ecosystems. SS was quantified as the relative fraction of community variation that is explained by environmental variables. I integrated data from 326 variation partition analyses in a generalized linear model, and found that a mean of 26.1% (minimum 0%, maximum 88%) of the variance in community composition was explained by environmental variables. I also found that organism body size and dispersal group were not related to the degree of SS. SS varied among trophic positions, being highest in autotrophs and omnivores and lowest in herbivores and decomposers. SS also varied among ecosystem types: it was lowest in lakes and highest in estuaries and marine environments. Studies using a...

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI

Metacommunity organisation, spatial extent and dispersal in aquatic systems: patterns, processes and prospects

TL;DR: A better understanding of the relative roles of species sorting, mass effects and dispersal limitation in affecting aquatic metacommunities requires the following: characterising dispersal rates more directly or adopting better proxies than have been used previously; considering the nature of aquatic networks; and combining correlative and experimental approaches.
Journal ArticleDOI

Contrasting the relative importance of species sorting and dispersal limitation in shaping marine bacterial versus protist communities.

TL;DR: The analyses indicated that protist communities were governed more strongly by species sorting relative to dispersal limitation than were bacterial communities; this pattern was consistent across the three-depth layers, albeit to different degrees, and supported the ‘size-plasticity’ hypothesis.
Journal ArticleDOI

Tree diversity and species identity effects on soil fungi, protists and animals are context dependent

TL;DR: This work developed a DNA metabarcoding approach to identify the major eukaryote groups directly from soil with roughly species-level resolution and revealed that on a local scale, soil resources and tree species have stronger effect on diversity of soil biota than tree species richness per se.
Journal ArticleDOI

Community assembly and the functioning of ecosystems: how metacommunity processes alter ecosystems attributes.

TL;DR: It is argued that when community assembly is strongly limited by dispersal, this can constrain ecosystem functioning by reducing positive selection effects even though it may often also enhance complementarity, and ecosystem function is thus most likely maximized at intermediate levels of dispersal.
Journal ArticleDOI

Metacommunity ecology meets biogeography: effects of geographical region, spatial dynamics and environmental filtering on community structure in aquatic organisms

TL;DR: It is concluded that aquatic communities across large scales are mostly determined by environmental and basin effects, which leads to high beta diversity and prevalence of Clementsian community types.
References
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Book

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TL;DR: In this paper, a philosophical introduction is given to logarithms, power curves, and correlations, and a mathematical primer: logarsithm, power curve and correlations.
Journal ArticleDOI

Spatial Scaling in Ecology

John A. Wiens
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Journal ArticleDOI

The Mineral Nutrition of Wild Plants

TL;DR: The nature of crop responses to nutrient stress is reviewed and compares these responses to those of species that have evolved under more natural conditions, particularly in low-nutrient envi­ ronments.
Journal ArticleDOI

Partialling out the spatial component of ecological variation

TL;DR: In this paper, a method is proposed to partition the variation of species abundance data into independent components: pure spatial, pure environmental, spatial component of environmental influence, and undetermined.
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