Journal ArticleDOI
Positive and negative effects of organisms as physical ecosystem engineers
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TLDR
It is argued that engineering has both negative and positive effects on species richness and abundances at small scales, but the net effects are probably positive at larger scales encompassing engineered and nonengineered environments in ecological and evolutionary space and time.Abstract:
Physical ecosystem engineers are organisms that directly or indirectly control the availability of resources to other organisms by causing physical state changes in biotic or abiotic materials. Physical ecosystem engineering by organisms is the physical modification, maintenance, or creation of habitats. Ecological effects of engineers on many other species occur in virtually all ecosystems because the physical state changes directly create nonfood resources such as living space, directly control abiotic resources, and indirectly modulate abiotic forces that, in turn, affect resource use by other organisms. Trophic interactions and resource competition do not constitute engineering. Engineering can have significant or trivial effects on other species, may involve the physical structure of an organism (like a tree) or structures made by an organism (like a beaver dam), and can, but does not invariably, have feedback effects on the engineer. We argue that engineering has both negative and positive effects on species richness and abundances at small scales, but the net effects are probably positive at larger scales encompassing engineered and nonengineered environments in ecological and evolutionary space and time. Models of the population dynamics of engineers suggest that the engineer/habitat equilibrium is often, but not always, locally stable and may show long-term cycles, with potential ramifications for community and ecosystem stability. As yet, data adequate to parameterize such a model do not exist for any engineer species. Because engineers control flows of energy and materials but do not have to participate in these flows, energy, mass, and stoichiometry do not appear to be useful in predicting which engineers will have big effects. Empirical observations suggest some potential generalizations about which species will be important engineers in which ecosystems. We point out some of the obvious, and not so obvious, ways in which engineering and trophic relations interact, and we call for greater research on physical ecosystem engineers, their impacts, and their interface with trophic relations.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Humans integrate visual and haptic information in a statistically optimal fashion.
TL;DR: The nervous system seems to combine visual and haptic information in a fashion that is similar to a maximum-likelihood integrator, and this model behaved very similarly to humans in a visual–haptic task.
Journal ArticleDOI
Vive la différence: plant functional diversity matters to ecosystem processes
Sandra Díaz,Marcelo Cabido +1 more
TL;DR: Crossfertilization between approaches based on species richness on the one hand, and on functional traits and types on the other, is a promising way of gaining mechanistic insight into the links between plant diversity and ecosystem processes and contributing to practical management for the conservation of diversity andcosystem services.
Journal ArticleDOI
Inclusion of facilitation into ecological theory
TL;DR: In this paper, the role of facilitation in the organization of terrestrial and aquatic communities has been investigated, and the importance of a wide variety of facilitative interactions has been considered.
Journal ArticleDOI
Facilitation in plant communities: the past, the present, and the future
Rob W. Brooker,Fernando T. Maestre,Ragan M. Callaway,Christopher L. Lortie,Lohengrin A. Cavieres,Georges Kunstler,Pierre Liancourt,Katja Tielbörger,Justin M. J. Travis,Fabien Anthelme,Cristina Armas,Lluís Coll,Emmanuel Corcket,Sylvain Delzon,Estelle Forey,Zaal Kikvidze,Johan Olofsson,Francisco I. Pugnaire,Constanza L. Quiroz,Patrick Saccone,Katja Schiffers,Merav Seifan,Blaize Touzard,Richard Michalet +23 more
TL;DR: There is substantial scope for exploring indirect facilitative effects in plant communities, including their impacts on diversity and evolution, and future studies should connect the degree of non-transitivity in plant competitive networks to community diversity and facilitative promotion of species coexistence.
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Network structure and biodiversity loss in food webs: robustness increases with connectance
TL;DR: Food-web structure mediates dramatic effects of biodiversity loss including secondary and ‘cascading’ extinctions and robustness increases with food-web connectance but appears independent of species richness and omnivory.
References
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Book ChapterDOI
Organisms as ecosystem engineers
TL;DR: The role that many organisms play in the creation, modification and maintenance of habitats does not involve direct trophic interactions between species, but they are nevertheless important and common.
Journal ArticleDOI
Organic matter and water-stable aggregates in soils
Judith. Tisdall,J.M. Oades +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the effectiveness of various binding agents at different stages in the structural organization of aggregates is described and forms the basis of a model which illustrates the architecture of an aggregate.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics.
Journal ArticleDOI
Competition and facilitation: a synthetic approach to interactions in plant communities
TL;DR: The roles of life stage, physiology, indirect interactions, and the physical environment on the balance of competition and facilitation in plant communities are discussed.