Journal ArticleDOI
The structure of lizard communities
TLDR
The topic here is the structure of lizard communities in this somewhat loose sense of the word (perhaps assemblage would be a more accurate description), with emphasis on the niche relationships among such sympatric sets of lizard species, especially as they affect the numbers of species that coexist within lizard communities.Abstract:
Strictly speaking, a community is composed of all the organisms that live together in a particular habitat. Community structure concerns all the various ways in which the members of such a community relate to and interact with one another, as well as community-level properties that emerge from these interactions, such as trophic structure, energy flow, species diversity, relative abundance, and community stabil ity. In practice, ecologists are usually unable to study entire communities, but instead interest is often focused on some convenient and tractable subset (usually taxonomic) of a particular community or series of communities. Thus one reads about plant communities, fish communities, bird communities, and so on. My topic here is the structure of lizard communities in this somewhat loose sense of the word (perhaps assemblage would be a more accurate description); my emphasis is on the niche relationships among such sympatric sets of lizard species, especially as they affect the numbers of species that coexist within lizard communities (species den sity). So defined, the simplest (and perhaps least interesting) lizard communities would be those that contain but a single species, as, for instance, northern populations of Eumeces msciatus. At the other extreme, probably the most complex lizard commu nities are those of the Australian sandridge deserts where as many as 40 different species occur in sympatry (20). Usually species densities of sympatric lizards vary from about 4 or 5 species to perhaps as many as 20. Lizard communities in arid regions are generally richer in species than those in wetter areas; therefore, because almost all ecological studies of entire saurofaunas have been in deserts (l8, 20, 25), this paper emphasizes the structure of desert lizard communities. As such, I review mostly my own work. Other studies on lizard communities in nondesert habitats are, however, cited where appropriate. Historical factors such as degree of isolation and available biotic stocks (particu larly the species pools of potential competitors and predators) have profoundly shaped lizard communities. Thus one reason the Australian deserts support such very rich lizard communities may be that competition with, and perhaps predation pressures from, snakes, birds, and mammals are reduced on that continent (20).read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Functional diversity (FD), species richness and community composition
Owen L. Petchey,Kevin J. Gaston +1 more
TL;DR: A means for quantifying functional diversity that may be particularly useful for determining how functional diversity is related to ecosystem functioning is proposed, defined as the total branch length of a functional dendrogram.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Measurement of Niche Overlap and Some Relatives
TL;DR: Two indices interpretable in terms of encounters are proposed, which in corporate variation in resource state abundance are also developed for mean crowding, patchiness and niche breadth.
Journal ArticleDOI
Phylogenetic Overdispersion in Floridian Oak Communities
TL;DR: It is shown that the oaks are phylogenetically overdispersed because co‐occurring species are more distantly related than expected by chance, and oaks within the same clade show less niche overlap than expected.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
On Optimal Use of a Patchy Environment
TL;DR: A graphical method is discussed which allows a specification of the optimal diet of a predator in terms of the net amount of energy gained from a capture of prey as compared to the energy expended in searching for the prey.
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The Anolis Lizards of Bimini: Resource Partitioning in a Complex Fauna
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Nonsynchronous Spatial Overlap of Lizards in Patchy Habitats
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Measurement of "overlap" in comparative ecological studies
TL;DR: Objective, empirical measures of overlap between samples of items distributed proportionally into various qualitative categories derived from either probability or information theory should prove useful to the ecologist in comparative studies of diet, habitat preference, seasonal patterns of abundance, faunal lists, or similar data.
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On the Measurement of Niche Breadth and Overlap
TL;DR: It is proposed that the species composition of communities utilizing different resource states may be used to develop weighting factors with which each state may be weighted in proportion to its degree of distinctness.