Community-Assembly Mechanics and the Structure of an Experimental Species Ensemble

Drake, James A.

doi:10.1086/285143

Cited by 532 publications

(497 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…There is some evidence that suggests this is indeed the case. Authors working on community assembly rules have extensively explored this point in laboratory experiments showing that the history of colonization leads to various alternative communities (Drake 1990;Samuels and Drake 1997). While these experiments are all on relatively small scales, real food webs are usually much more complex (Dunne et al 2002).…”

Section: Empirical Evidence Of Alternative Attractors In Communitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Large Species Shifts Triggered by Small Forces

Nes

Scheffer

2004

The American Naturalist

125

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Changes in species composition of communities seem to proceed gradually at first sight, but remarkably rapid shifts are known to occur. Although disrupting disturbances seem an obvious explanation for such shifts, evidence for large disturbances is not always apparent. Here we show that complex communities tend to move through occasional catastrophic shifts in response to gradual environmental change or evolution. This tendency is caused by multiple attractors that may exist in such systems. We show that alternative attractors arise robustly in randomly generated multispecies models, especially if competition is symmetrical and if interspecific competition is allowed to exceed intraspecific competition. Inclusion of predators as a second trophic level did not alter the results greatly, although it reduced the probability of alternative attractors somewhat. These results suggest that alternative attractors may commonly arise from interactions between large numbers of species. Consequently, the response of complex communities to environmental change is expected to be characterized by hysteresis and sudden shifts. Some unexplained regime shifts observed in ecosystems could be related to alternative attractors arising from complex species interactions. Additionally, our results support the idea that ancient mass extinctions may partly be due to an intrinsic loss of stability of species configurations.

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Section: Empirical Evidence Of Alternative Attractors In Communitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Large Species Shifts Triggered by Small Forces

Nes

Scheffer

2004

The American Naturalist

125

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“…Two of the major goals in ecology are to determine the factors responsible for species coexistence and to use that information to formulate predictive models of community assembly (May 1975;Drake 1991;Strange and Foin 1999). Species coexistence in stream fishes is often a result of niche partitioning in which species differ along axes of food, habitat, or activity times (Ross 1986;Nishikawa and Nakano 1998;Herder and Freyhof 2006).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling Stream Fish Assemblages with Niche Apportionment Models: Patterns, Processes, and Scale Dependence

Higgins

Strauss

2008

Trans Am Fish Soc

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Abstract.-Understanding patterns in terms of the mechanistic processes that produce them is the essence of ecology. However, many studies merely document nonrandom patterns of species coexistence without providing insight into the structuring mechanisms and their scale dependence. Moreover, few studies address the mechanisms driving functional diversity. The objectives of this study were to document empirical patterns of species coexistence within stream fish assemblages across a broad geographic region, addressing both the functional and taxonomic organization of those assemblages, and to determine whether the structuring mechanisms are scale dependent. We gathered data from a report published by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department that provided empirical species abundance distributions for 62 assemblages from 7 ecoregions and 18 river basins. For each assemblage, we simulated expected species abundances using five previously published models of niche apportionment. These models generate relative abundances in proportion to niche breadth and are constrained to maintain observed species richness, but they do not include information on species identity. These models included four stochastic variants of a geometric series (dominance preemption, random fraction, broken stick, and dominance decay) in which species abundances relate directly to niche breadth and one model (random assortment) in which abundances are independent of niche partitioning altogether. To assess scale dependence, we repeated the analyses after pooling assemblages by ecoregion, river basin, and the entire state. The patterns of niche apportionment for assemblages pooled according to river basin are more consistent with local assemblages than with assemblages pooled according to ecoregions or the entire state. These results suggest that niche apportionment plays a crucial role in structuring stream fish assemblages and that functional groups divide niche space more evenly than do species.

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“…Although food web-building algorithms can go some way to circumventing the connectance constraint (Post and Pimm 1983;Taylor 1988;Drake 1990), the algorithms in this article were not able to match the behavior of real webs. Consequently, in order to obtain webs with realistic connectance, dynamical algorithms will have to be supplemented with additional stabilizing assumptions, such as taking into account the body mass of the species (Brose et al 2006).…”

Section: The Algorithms Produced Low-connectance Webs With Indistinctmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…DOI: 10.1086/524953 step, according to some prespecified rules. There is already a large body of food web assembly literature (Tregonning and Roberts 1979;Post and Pimm 1983;Mithen and Lawton 1986;Taylor 1988;Drake 1990;Law and Blackford 1992;Luh and Pimm 1993;Law and Morton 1996;Lockwood et al 1997;Drossel et al 2001;Bastolla et al 2005;Virgo et al 2006) and a complimentary literature testing the predictions of the algorithms in experimental systems such as microcosms (Dickerson and Robinson 1986;Robinson and Dickerson 1987;Drake 1991;Wardle et al 1995;Moyle and Light 1996;Weatherby et al 1998;Chase 2003;Fukami 2004). Because assembly algorithms simulate invasion and extinction in a whole food web, they hold great promise for answering questions about succession, rehabilitation, and invasibility.…”

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confidence: 99%

Permanence Does Not Predict the Commonly Measured Food Web Structural Attributes

Kristensen¹

2008

The American Naturalist

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Submitted April 9, 2007; Accepted September 13, 2007; Electronically published December 14, 2007 Online enhancement: appendix.abstract: Food web assembly algorithms show great promise for investigating issues involving the dynamics of whole webs, such as succession, rehabilitation, and invasibility. Permanence, which requires that all species densities remain positive and finite, has been suggested as a good stability constraint. This study tests the validity of the permanence constraint by comparing real webs and model webs from the literature to the predictions of three assembly algorithms: one constrained by permanence and feasibility, one constrained by feasibility alone, and one with no dynamical constraint. It is found that the addition of the permanence constraint does not improve the predictive ability of the algorithm. Its main effect is to increase the efficiency of species selected for the web. Dynamically constrained webs have lower connectance and indistinct trophic levels compared to real webs and webs from other models, which is a consequence of omitting species' physiology. Although webs are less likely to be permanent if they have high omnivory and cycling, the web-building process circumvents this constraint. The challenges of testing and justifying system-level hypotheses, including isolating and detecting their effects, are discussed.Keywords: food webs, stability, permanence, feasibility, niche model, nested-hierarchy model.A food web-building algorithm is a series of repeating steps by which model food webs can be created. Starting with one or a few species, the algorithm permits new species to invade and some species to be lost at each time Weatherby et al. 1998;Chase 2003;Fukami 2004). Because assembly algorithms simulate invasion and extinction in a whole food web, they hold great promise for answering questions about succession, rehabilitation, and invasibility. The rules governing which food webs survive intact to the next time step are often based on dynamical constraints (though not always; e.g., Luh and Pimm 1993). For example, food webs may be constrained to be feasible (i.e., all species have a positive steady state biomass [e.g., Tregonning and Roberts 1979]) or locally stable (e.g., Post and Pimm 1983). This article focuses on a dynamical constraint called permanence. A food web is permanent if the densities of all species remain positive and finite and it can recover after those densities are brought arbitrarily close to 0 (Hofbauer and Sigmund 1988). Permanence has the advantage over local stability in that it does not presuppose the existence of a single steady state but does allow for complex trajectories within the phase space, such a...

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Community-Assembly Mechanics and the Structure of an Experimental Species Ensemble

Cited by 532 publications

References 40 publications

Large Species Shifts Triggered by Small Forces

Large Species Shifts Triggered by Small Forces

Modeling Stream Fish Assemblages with Niche Apportionment Models: Patterns, Processes, and Scale Dependence

Permanence Does Not Predict the Commonly Measured Food Web Structural Attributes

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