Positive interactions in communities

Bertness, Mark D.; Callaway, Ragan M.

doi:10.1016/0169-5347(94)90088-4

Cited by 3,223 publications

(3,352 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…2). As productivity at our sites increases strongly with rainfall, this pattern corroborates the model of Bertness & Callaway (1994) and between-site differences for RII values were similar for all response variables, irrespective of life-history stage. Therefore, the time at which interactions among plants are studied does not necessarily affect the qualitative outcome of experiments designed to test for the effect of interaction with the environment on relationships.…”

Section:     -  supporting

confidence: 67%

Ontogenetic shifts in interactions among annual plants

2006

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Summary 1Interactions among plants strongly influence the structure and dynamics of plant populations and communities. However, most empirical studies of plant-plant interactions failed to make repeated measures of responses to neighbouring individuals and thereby neglected possible changes in interactions throughout the life history of the plants.2 We tested the hypothesis that competition between annual species intensifies from early to late life-history stages, by sequentially measuring interactions in neighbourremoval experiments at three study sites located along a rainfall gradient in Israel. 3 Two annual species, Biscutella didyma and Hymenocarpos circinnatus , grew with and without neighbours in their natural habitats. Five response variables representing consecutive life-history stages (seedling survival, juvenile biomass, adult survival, number of seeds and final biomass) were recorded throughout the whole growing season. 4 The direction and intensity of interactions varied considerably between environments and life stages. On average, growth-related response variables indicated higher competition intensity at the productive end of the climatic gradient, while survival indicated either facilitation at the dry end or no trend along the gradient. 5 Temporal changes occurred, with moderate facilitation soon after germination shifting to strong competition at the end of the growing season. 6 Our results demonstrate that the outcome of experimental studies on plant-plant interactions may depend not only on the environmental productivity but more so on the life stage at which the target plant is studied.

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Section:     -  supporting

confidence: 67%

Ontogenetic shifts in interactions among annual plants

2006

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“…Competitive or facilitative interactions can be defined as interactions in which the presence of one species alters the environment (or occupies space) in a way that reduces or enhances growth, survival, and reproduction of a second species (Bronstein, 2009; Craine, Fargione, & Sugita, 2005; McIntire & Fajardo, 2014). The relative importance of these two processes has been shown to vary along environmental gradients, with competition generally dominating in communities of low‐abiotic stress, while facilitation increases in importance with abiotic stress (framed in the stress gradient hypothesis ; Bertness & Callaway, 1994; Callaway & Walker, 1997; Choler, Michalet, & Callaway, 2001; Callaway et al., 2002; Michalet, Schöb, Lortie, Brooker, & Callaway, 2014). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Frequency and intensity of facilitation reveal opposing patterns along a stress gradient

Gallien

Zurell

Zimmermann

2018

Ecology and Evolution

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Disentangling the different processes structuring ecological communities is a long‐standing challenge. In species‐rich ecosystems, most emphasis has so far been given to environmental filtering and competition processes, while facilitative interactions between species remain insufficiently studied. Here, we propose an analysis framework that not only allows for identifying pairs of facilitating and facilitated species, but also estimates the strength of facilitation and its variation along environmental gradients. Our framework combines the analysis of both co‐occurrence and co‐abundance patterns using a moving window approach along environmental gradients to control for potentially confounding effects of environmental filtering in the co‐abundance analysis. We first validate our new approach against community assembly simulations, and exemplify its potential on a large 1,134 plant community plots dataset. Our results generally show that facilitation intensity was strongest under cold stress, whereas the proportion of facilitating and facilitated species was higher under drought stress. Moreover, the functional distance between individual facilitated species and their facilitating species significantly changed along the temperature–moisture gradient, and seemed to influence facilitation intensity, although no general positive or general negative trend was discernible among species. The main advantages of our robust framework are as follows: It enables detecting facilitating and facilitated species in species‐rich systems, and it allows identifying the directionality and intensity of facilitation in species pairs as well as its variation across long environmental gradients. It thus opens numerous opportunities for incorporating functional (and phylogenetic) information in the analysis of facilitation patterns. Our case study indicated high complexity in facilitative interactions across the stress gradient and revealed new evidence that facilitation, similarly to competition, can operate between functionally similar and dissimilar species. Extending the analyses to other taxa and ecosystems will foster our understanding how complex interspecific interactions promote biodiversity.

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“…Local facilitation by sessile organisms is also ubiquitous in physically harsh habitats other than arid ecosystems, such as salt marshes, alpine areas and intertidal zones (Bertness and Callaway, 1994;Bertness and Leonard, 1997;Stachowicz, 2001;Callaway et al, 2002;van de Koppel et al, 2005). The objective of this work is to gain insight into the link between bistability, vegetation patchiness and local facilitation in harsh environments.…”

Section: Article In Pressmentioning

confidence: 99%

Local facilitation, bistability and transitions in arid ecosystems

Kéfi

Rietkerk

Baalen³

et al. 2007

Theoretical Population Biology

173

221

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Arid ecosystems are liable to undergo sudden discontinuous transitions from a vegetated to a desert state as a result of human pressure and climate change. A predictive framework about the conditions under which such transitions occur is lacking. Here, we derive and analyze a general model describing the spatial dynamics of vegetation in arid ecosystems considering local facilitation as an essential process. We investigate the conditions under which continuous or discontinuous transitions from a vegetated to a desert state are likely to occur. We focus on arid ecosystems but our approach is sufficiently general to be applied to other ecosystems with severe environmental conditions. The model exhibits bistability and vegetation patchiness. High local facilitation decreases the risk of discontinuous transitions. Moreover, for arid ecosystems where local facilitation is a driving process, vegetation patchiness indicates proximity to a transition point, but does not allow distinguishing between continuous and discontinuous transitions. r

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Positive interactions in communities

Cited by 3,223 publications

References 30 publications

Ontogenetic shifts in interactions among annual plants

Ontogenetic shifts in interactions among annual plants

Frequency and intensity of facilitation reveal opposing patterns along a stress gradient

Local facilitation, bistability and transitions in arid ecosystems

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