Interspecific facilitation favors rare species establishment and reduces performance disparities among adults

Abstract

Questions A variety of mechanisms sustain diversity in natural communities as a result of ecological interactions between organisms. Competition has been studied extensively in the context of species maintenance, but facilitation is often conceptualized as simply reducing competition between functionally different species, which tends to decline throughout the plants' life span. Here we explore how interspecific facilitation may sustain diversity throughout the species' life by avoiding the extinction of locally rare species at juvenile stages and reducing performance disparities between neighbors of differing species at mature stages. Methods To do so, we measured whether rarer species relied more on facilitation than abundant ones in semiarid shrubland in southeast Spain. A mechanistic explanation of this relationship was subsequently tested by correlating rarity with the species' affinity to a particularly edaphic stressful environment. Finally, we assessed whether growing associated with neighbors in vegetation patches shaped by facilitation could balance performance disparities between species when they become adults. Results We show that facilitation (i) favors the rare species, which, in addition, tend to be those with low affinity to the stressful environment, and (ii) reduces the performance dissimilarities among plants growing associated within multispecific vegetation patches compared to plants growing alone. Conclusions These facilitative effects, beyond the reduction of competition between functionally similar species, might ensure positive and long‐lasting effects of biotic interactions, implying a more critical role for facilitation in preserving biodiversity than previously thought.

Arbuscular mycorrhiza increases the facilitation between adult plant and seedling but root‐knot nematode inhibits it

“…It should be noted that although intraspecific interactions were the focus of these experiments, interspecific interactions can have a significant impact on the distribution of invasive seedlings (Marushia & Holt, 2008). Considering the effects of cooperation on interactions between neighboring invasive plants in the future will contribute to a better understanding of the impact of facilitation at the invaded community scale (Sánchez‐Martín et al, 2023).…”