Journal ArticleDOI
Niches versus neutrality: uncovering the drivers of diversity in a species-rich community.
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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
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Disentangling the importance of ecological niches from stochastic processes across scales
Jonathan M. Chase,Jonathan Myers +1 more
TL;DR: A framework for disentangling the relative importance of deterministic and stochastic processes in generating site-to-site variation in species composition along ecological gradients and among biogeographic regions that differ in the size of the regional species pool is developed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Ecological assembly rules in plant communities--approaches, patterns and prospects.
Lars Götzenberger,Francesco de Bello,Kari Anne Bråthen,John Davison,Anne Dubuis,Antoine Guisan,Jan Lepš,Jan Lepš,Regina Lindborg,Regina Lindborg,Mari Moora,Meelis Pärtel,Loïc Pellissier,Julien Pottier,Pascal Vittoz,Kristjan Zobel,Martin Zobel +16 more
TL;DR: This work redefined the traditional concept of assembly rules in a more general framework where the co‐occurrence of species is a product of chance, historical patterns of speciation and migration, dispersal, abiotic environmental factors, and biotic interactions, with none of these processes being mutually exclusive.
Journal ArticleDOI
Functional Rarity: The Ecology of Outliers
Cyrille Violle,Wilfried Thuiller,Nicolas Mouquet,Nicolas Mouquet,François Munoz,François Munoz,Nathan J. B. Kraft,Marc W. Cadotte,Stuart W. Livingstone,David Mouillot,David Mouillot +10 more
TL;DR: This work introduces 12 different forms of functional rarity along gradients of species scarcity and trait distinctiveness and highlights the potential key role offunctional rarity in the long-term and large-scale maintenance of ecosystem processes.
Journal ArticleDOI
Changes in coexistence mechanisms along a long‐term soil chronosequence revealed by functional trait diversity
Norman W. H. Mason,Sarah J. Richardson,Duane A. Peltzer,Francesco de Bello,David A. Wardle,David A. Wardle,Robert B. Allen +6 more
TL;DR: The results demonstrate that at high fertility dominant species differ in resource use strategy, but as soil fertility declines over the long-term, dominant species increasingly converge on a resource-retentive strategy, which suggests that differentiation in resourceUse strategy is required for co-existence at highertility but not in low fertility ecosystems.
Journal ArticleDOI
Niche overlap reveals the effects of competition, disturbance and contrasting assembly processes in experimental grassland communities
TL;DR: These results suggest that plant population and community dynamics in grassland communities should increase with increasing biomass and decrease with distur-bance ingrassland communities, and emphasize that contrasting community assembly processes mayoccurfordifferentnicheaxes, even withinasinglecommunity.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Biodiversity in metacommunities: Plankton as complex adaptive systems?
Mathew A. Leibold,Jon Norberg +1 more
TL;DR: It is hypothesize that connectivity through dispersal of local communities that are embedded in aquatic metacommunities show a range of dynamic behaviors related to their capacity to respond adaptively to environmental change.
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Strong and weak tests of macroecological theory
TL;DR: It is demonstrated that testing exclusively by curve fitting is very weak and a poor way for macroecology to proceed in the search for mechanisms, and ways to make stronger tests are looked at.
Journal ArticleDOI
Patterns in body mass distributions: sifting among alternative hypotheses.
Craig R. Allen,Ahjond S. Garmestani,Tanya D. Havlicek,Pablo A. Marquet,Garry D. Peterson,Carla Restrepo,Craig A. Stow,B. E. Weeks +7 more
TL;DR: Several hypotheses about species body mass distributions have been proposed to explain the observed patterns as mentioned in this paper, e.g., energetic, phylogenetic, biogeographical, textural discontinuity, and community interaction hypotheses.
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Towards a resolution of ‘the paradox of the plankton’: A brief overview of the proposed mechanisms
TL;DR: It is found that, although the different mechanisms proposed so far is potentially applicable to specific ecosystems, a universally accepted theory for explaining plankton diversity in natural waters is still an unachieved goal.
Journal ArticleDOI
Species abundance distributions over time.
TL;DR: It is argued that it is essential to take account of time, and not only because sampling duration can have a profound influence on the perceived shape of the distribution, but also because changes in abundance distributions across all three of Preston's temporal scales present rich opportunities for ecological research.