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
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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
The unified neutral theory of biodiversity : Do the numbers add up?
TL;DR: Testing the model for passerine birds shows that drift is too slow to account for turnover in regional avifaunas, and Ecological reality can be added to the mix while retaining Hubbell's concept of continuity of communities in space and time.
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Life History Trade-Offs Assemble Ecological Guilds
TL;DR: How continuously varying life histories and trade-offs in these characteristics can allow multiple competitors to coexist and how limiting similarity emerges and is shaped by the ecological and evolutionary characteristics of competitors is revealed.
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Scaling of phytoplankton photosynthesis and cell size in the ocean
TL;DR: It is found that phytoplankton photosynthesis in the ocean does not scale as the L-power of cell size, but scales approximately isometrically with cellsize, indicating that a single model cannot predict the metabolism–size relationship in all photosynthetic organisms.
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Concurrent niche and neutral processes in the competition–colonization model of species coexistence
TL;DR: Using competition–colonization trade-offs between species of aquatic micro-organisms to show that equalizing and stabilizing mechanisms can operate simultaneously, and suggest that neutral- and niche-based mechanisms of coexistence can simultaneously operate at differing temporal and spatial scales.