Assembly Rules, Null Models, and Trait Dispersion: New Questions from Old Patterns

Weiher, Evan; Keddy, Paul A.

doi:10.2307/3545686

Cited by 780 publications

(957 citation statements)

References 64 publications

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“…C−, three cuts per year; C+, six cuts per year; N− and N+ representing 12 and 36 g N m −2 year −1 , respectively. FT and FD indices were used to infer the effect of habitat-filtering and niche differentiation processes on species abundance, respectively which is, according to the authors, in agreement with the theoretical pattern, predicting "a shift from biotically-driven divergence to abiotically-driven convergence with increasing spatial scale of observation" (Weiher and Keddy 1995;Holdaway and Sparrow 2006). Similarly to the spatial scale, the pattern of convergence and divergence has been theorized to depend on the severity of environment.…”

Section: Which Assembly Process For Which Conditions?supporting

confidence: 54%

Grass strategies and grassland community responses to environmental drivers: a review

Pontes

Maire

Schellberg

et al. 2015

Agron. Sustain. Dev.

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Grassland covers about one quarter of the Earth's land area and is currently estimated to contribute to the livelihoods of over 800 million people. Grassland provides ecosystem goods and services, mainly through the provisioning of milk and meat. Therefore, the proper use of grasslands will be essential for feeding the nine billion people that will inhabit planet Earth by 2050. In the context of a changing climate, we should better understand the interactions of environment, management and grass crop at individual, community and ecosystem levels. Functional ecology focuses on the roles and functions that species play in the community or ecosystem in which they occur. Functional ecology thus aims to understand how plant species adapt to environmental conditions and how management can alter this adaptation. Here, we review the latest advances in plant functional traits research and on species strategies to the main environmental factors occurring in grassland ecosystems: nutrient availability, grazing, cutting and shading. Functional ecology also provides a framework to better understand how species strategies interact with the species composition at the community level. Therefore, the literature on community assembling theories in relation to ecosystem processes most relevant to grassland management and services is also reviewed. Finally, future research questions and some new orientations for grassland experts are offered in order to meet the challenge of maintaining productivity and preservation of these semi-natural environments in the face of global change.

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Section: Which Assembly Process For Which Conditions?supporting

confidence: 54%

Grass strategies and grassland community responses to environmental drivers: a review

Pontes

Maire

Schellberg

et al. 2015

Agron. Sustain. Dev.

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“…A general model of how community assembly might vary with scale and along gradients made the following predictions [25]: (i) community assembly should be neutral where both competitive adversity and environmental adversity are weak, (ii) trait overdispersion should be limited to small spatial scales over which species actually interact, and (iii) as scale increases, patterns of trait overdispersion should first become increasingly neutral and then should shift to trait underdispersion/convergence. This can be thought of as a pattern of trait overdispersion within a certain community type (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Advances, challenges and a developing synthesis of ecological community assembly theory

Weiher

Freund

Bunton

et al. 2011

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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545

564

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Ecological approaches to community assembly have emphasized the interplay between neutral processes, niche-based environmental filtering and niche-based species sorting in an interactive milieu. Recently, progress has been made in terms of aligning our vocabulary with conceptual advances, assessing how trait-based community functional parameters differ from neutral expectation and assessing how traits vary along environmental gradients. Experiments have confirmed the influence of these processes on assembly and have addressed the role of dispersal in shaping local assemblages. Community phylogenetics has forged common ground between ecologists and biogeographers, but it is not a proxy for trait-based approaches. Community assembly theory is in need of a comparative synthesis that addresses how the relative importance of niche and neutral processes varies among taxa, along environmental gradients, and across scales. Towards that goal, we suggest a set of traits that probably confer increasing community neutrality and regionality and review the influences of stress, disturbance and scale on the importance of niche assembly. We advocate increasing the complexity of experiments in order to assess the relative importance of multiple processes. As an example, we provide evidence that dispersal, niche processes and trait interdependencies have about equal influence on trait-based assembly in an experimental grassland.

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“…We then collected aboveground biomass for all plant species contained within the 0.7 × 1.7 m area, and determined the dry mass of each species (Peltzer et al 2009). We also collected fresh foliage of 40 plant species (14 native species and 26 non-native species) to measure foliar N and P concentrations in order to facilitate trait-based interpretation of community divergence (Weiher and Keddy 1995;Shipley et al 2006;Ackerly and Cornwell 2007). Together, the 40 species comprised >99 % of the total aboveground biomass, and the 14 native species also comprised >99 % of the total native aboveground biomass in the system.…”

Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Not all local communities are randomly assembled, however (Götzenberger et al 2012;Rajaniemi et al 2012). Some species may modify local habitat conditions upon arrival, and consequently influence the kind of species that can subsequently establish, facilitating some species with certain ecological traits, while inhibiting others with other traits (Weiher and Keddy 1995;Grime 1998;Lepš et al 2001;Fukami et al 2005). If so, local communities that vary stochastically in the timing of the arrival of key species can diverge in species composition, resulting in higher beta diversity than expected solely from environmental filtering and otherwise random assembly (Chase 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Non-Native Plants Disrupt Dual Promotion of Native Alpha and Beta Diversity

et al. 2013

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Non-native species can alter patterns of species diversity at multiple spatial scales, but the processes that underlie multi-scale effects remain unclear. Here we show that non-native species reduce native diversity at multiple scales through simultaneous disruption of two processes of native community assembly: species immigration, which enhances alpha diversity, and community divergence, which enhances beta diversity. Community divergence refers to the process in which local communities diverge over time in species composition because the history of species immigration and, consequently, the way species affect one another within communities are variable among communities. Continuous experimental removal of species over four years of floodplain succession revealed that, when non-native species were excluded, stochastic variation in the timing of a dominant native species' arrival allowed local communities to diverge, thereby enhancing beta diversity, without compromising promotion of alpha diversity by species immigration. In contrast, when non-native species were allowed to enter experimental plots, they not only reduced native alpha diversity by limiting immigration, but also diminished the dominant native species' role in enhancing native beta diversity. Our results highlight the importance of community assembly and succession for understanding multi-scale effects of non-native species.

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Assembly Rules, Null Models, and Trait Dispersion: New Questions from Old Patterns

Cited by 780 publications

References 64 publications

Grass strategies and grassland community responses to environmental drivers: a review

Grass strategies and grassland community responses to environmental drivers: a review

Advances, challenges and a developing synthesis of ecological community assembly theory

Non-Native Plants Disrupt Dual Promotion of Native Alpha and Beta Diversity

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