Journal ArticleDOI
Niches versus neutrality: uncovering the drivers of diversity in a species-rich community.
TLDR
This work provides the first empirical evidence that a niche-neutral model can explain niche space occupancy pattern in a natural species-rich community and suggests this class of model may be a useful hypothesis for the generation and maintenance of species diversity in other size-structured communities.Abstract:
Ecological models suggest that high diversity can be generated by purely niche-based, purely neutral or by a mixture of niche-based and neutral ecological processes. Here, we compare the degree to which four contrasting hypotheses for coexistence, ranging from niche-based to neutral, explain species richness along a body mass niche axis. We derive predictions from these hypotheses and confront them with species body-mass patterns in a highly sampled marine phytoplankton community. We find that these patterns are consistent only with a mechanism that combines niche and neutral processes, such as the emergent neutrality mechanism. In this work, we provide the first empirical evidence that a niche-neutral model can explain niche space occupancy pattern in a natural species-rich community. We suggest this class of model may be a useful hypothesis for the generation and maintenance of species diversity in other size-structured communities.read more
Citations
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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
Drivers of seedling survival in a temperate forest and their relative importance at three stages of succession
TL;DR: It is demonstrated that the relative importance of NDD and habitat niche partitioning in driving seedling survival varies with seedling size and age and that the biotic and abiotic factors affecting seedlings survival change with successional stage.
Journal ArticleDOI
Limited niche differentiation within remarkable co‐occurrences of congeneric species: Monomorium ants in the Australian seasonal tropics
TL;DR: It is suggested that competitive exclusion is prevented by the modular nature of ant colonies, with competition limiting colony performance but not preventing occurrence, and that other factors that allow species persistence, and not just competitive equivalence, can allow dispersal and establishment processes to drive species coexistence.
Journal ArticleDOI
Community assembly and diversification in Indo-Pacific coral reef fishes
TL;DR: The present results support a neutral model of community assembly as a consequence of the stochastic and unpredictable nature of coral reefs favoring generalist and sedentary species competing for living space rather than trophic resources.
Journal ArticleDOI
Trait assembly of woody plants in communities across sub-alpine gradients: Identifying the role of limiting similarity
TL;DR: This work uses a null model to investigate plant community assembly theories on two sub-alpine gradients of woody vegetation and found that six out of eight traits showed significantly uneven spacing within some plots, notably towards the forest end of the gradient.
References
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Book
Generalized Additive Models: An Introduction with R, Second Edition
TL;DR: In this article, a simple linear model is proposed to describe the geometry of linear models, and a general linear model specification in R is presented. But the theory of linear model theory is not discussed.
Book
The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography
TL;DR: A study of the issue indicates that it is not a serious problem for neutral theory, and there is sometimes a difference between some of the simulation-based results of Hubbell and the analytical results of Volkov et al. (2003).
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Mechanisms of Maintenance of Species Diversity
TL;DR: Stabilizing mechanisms are essential for species coexistence and include traditional mechanisms such as resource partitioning and frequency-dependent predation, as well as mechanisms that depend on fluctuations in population densities and environmental factors in space and time.
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The Competitive Exclusion Principle
TL;DR: By emphasizing the very aspects that might result in their denial of them were they less plain the authors can keep the principle explicitly present in their minds untit they see if its implications are, or are noty as unpleasant as their subconscious might suppose.
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The Paradox of the Plankton
TL;DR: The problem that is presented by the phytoplankton is essentially how it is possible for a number of species to coexist in a relatively isotropic or unstructured environment all competing for the same sorts of materials.