Journal ArticleDOI
How do habitat filtering and niche conservatism affect community composition at different taxonomic resolutions
TLDR
A novel model in which immigrants from the regional pool are filtered according to their habitat preferences and the local environment, while taxa potentially retain habitat preferences from their ancestors (niche conservatism) is proposed.Abstract:
Understanding how local species assembly depends on the regional biogeographic and environmental context is a challenging task in community ecology. In spatially implicit neutral models, a single immigration parameter, I(k), represents the flux of immigrants from a regional pool that compete with local offspring for establishment in communities. This flux counterbalances the effect of local stochastic extinctions to maintain local species diversity. If some species within the regional pool are not adapted to the local environment (habitat filtering), the migrant flux is reduced beyond that of the neutral model, such that habitat filtering influences the value of I(k) in non-neutral situations. Here, we propose a novel model in which immigrants from the regional pool are filtered according to their habitat preferences and the local environment, while taxa potentially retain habitat preferences from their ancestors (niche conservatism). Using both analytical reasoning and simulations, we demonstrate that I(k) is expected to be constant when estimated based on the community composition at several taxonomic levels, not only under neutral assumptions, but also when habitat filtering occurs, unless there is substantial niche conservatism. In the latter case, I(k) is expected to decrease when estimated based on the composition at species to genus and family levels, thus allowing a signature of niche conservatism to be detected by simply comparing I(k) estimates across taxonomic levels. We applied this approach to three rain forest data sets from South India and Central America and found no significant signature of niche conservatism when I(k) was compared across taxonomic levels, except at the family level in South India. We further observed more limited immigration in South Indian forests, supporting the hypothesis of a greater impact of habitat filtering and heterogeneity there than in Central America. Our results highlight the relevance of studying variations of I(k) in space and across taxonomic levels to test hypotheses about the ecological and evolutionary drivers of biodiversity patterns.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Phylogenetic scale in ecology and evolution
TL;DR: In this article, the concept of phylogenetic scale has been formalized, and a review of the use of scale to address a range of biological questions is provided, including the effects of scale on a variety of well-known patterns and processes, including diversification rates, community structure, niche conservatism or species abundance distribution.
Journal ArticleDOI
Methods of Forest Structure Research: a Review
TL;DR: A systematic summary of the quantitative analysis methods of forest structure can be found in this article, where the authors provide an in-depth, multi-faceted interpretation of the forest structure at different levels.
Journal ArticleDOI
ecolottery: Simulating and assessing community assembly with environmental filtering and neutral dynamics in R
François Munoz,Matthias Grenié,Pierre Denelle,Adrien Taudière,Fabien Laroche,Caroline M. Tucker,Caroline M. Tucker,Cyrille Violle +7 more
TL;DR: The R package ecolottery is introduced, a coalescent-based simulation algorithm that presents significant advantages over alternative algorithms and can be used to explore the outcome of ecological and evolutionary processes playing at local and regional scales, and to estimate the parameters of these processes based on observed patterns.
Journal ArticleDOI
From the Neutral Theory to a Comprehensive and Multiscale Theory of Ecological Equivalence.
François Munoz,Philippe Huneman +1 more
TL;DR: It is underline that ecological equivalence, although central to neutral theory, can emerge at local and regional scales from niche-based processes through equalizing and stabilizing mechanisms and is best understood as a parsimonious baseline to address biodiversity dynamics at multiple scales.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Bootstrap Methods for Standard Errors, Confidence Intervals, and Other Measures of Statistical Accuracy
Bradley Efron,Robert Tibshirani +1 more
TL;DR: The bootstrap is extended to other measures of statistical accuracy such as bias and prediction error, and to complicated data structures such as time series, censored data, and regression models.
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Phylogenies and Community Ecology
TL;DR: A common pattern of phylogenetic conservatism in ecological character is recognized and the challenges of using phylogenies of partial lineages are highlighted and phylogenetic approaches to three emergent properties of communities: species diversity, relative abundance distributions, and range sizes are reviewed.
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Niche Conservatism: Integrating Evolution, Ecology, and Conservation Biology
TL;DR: This work describes how niche conservatism in climatic tolerances may limit geographic range expansion and how this one type of niche conservatism may be important in allopatric speciation and the spread of invasive, human-introduced species.
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The merging of community ecology and phylogenetic biology
TL;DR: Several key areas are reviewed in which phylogenetic information helps to resolve long-standing controversies in community ecology, challenges previous assumptions, and opens new areas of investigation.
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Conceptual Synthesis in Community Ecology
TL;DR: Organizing the material of community ecology according to this framework can clarify the essential similarities and differences among the many conceptual and theoretical approaches to the discipline, and allow for the articulation of a very general theory of community dynamics.