Superorganisms or loose collections of species? A unifying theory of community patterns along environmental gradients

Liautaud, Kévin; Nes, Egbert H. van; Barbier, Matthieu; Scheffer, Marten; Loreau, Michel

doi:10.1111/ele.13289

Cited by 67 publications

(67 citation statements)

References 73 publications

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“…Priority effects are a common feature of community assembly, and imply that different stable compositions can become established, depending on initial biotic conditions (Law & Morton 1996, Fukami & Nakajima 2011. Sharp spatial boundaries (ecotones) can arise between alternate communities in a homogeneous or smooth environment (Liautaud et al 2019), and a perturbation can push a community from one state to the other. From our work, it follows that those phenomena ought to be deeply entangled with the communities' longterm response to invasions (Gaertner et al 2014, Kotta et al 2018).…”

Section: Alternative Stable States In High-diversity Communitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fitness and community feedbacks: the two axes that drive long-term invasion impacts

Arnoldi

Barbier

Kelly

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Many facets of ecological theory rely on the analysis of invasion processes, and general approaches exist to understand the early stages of an invasion. However, predicting the long-term transformations of communities following an invasion remains a challenging endeavour. We propose an analytical method to predict whether these impacts can be large, as a function of community structure and invader dynamical characteristics, applicable to a wide class of dynamical models. Our approach reveals that short-term invasion success and long-term consequences are two independent axes of variation controlled by different properties of both invader and resident community. Whether a species can invade is controlled by its invasion fitness, which depends on environmental conditions and direct interactions with resident species. But whether this invasion will cause significant transformations, such as extinctions or a regime shift, depends on a specific measure of indirect feedbacks that may involve the entire resident community. Using this metric, we investigate how the complexity, specialization and asymmetry of invader-resident and resident-resident interactions may affect the severity of invasion impacts. Our approach applies to arbitrarily complex communities, from few competing phenotypes to large nonlinear food webs, and hints at new questions to ask as part of any invasion analysis.

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Section: Alternative Stable States In High-diversity Communitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fitness and community feedbacks: the two axes that drive long-term invasion impacts

Arnoldi

Barbier

Kelly

et al. 2019

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…One intriguing question that has received an increasing amount of interest over the past few years is whether microbial communities may be regarded as coherent units, on which selection can act directly [145,146]. If this were the case, we might be able to select for certain desired community-level properties, such as efficiency in producing a specific compound [44].…”

Section: Scaling Upmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding the evolution of interspecies interactions in microbial communities

Gorter

Manhart

Ackermann

2020

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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“…In this study, we assume that species' carrying capacities are only influenced by a single factor E, although we recognize that many abiotic factors can also affect K in nature. The presence of direct competition between species can also have an influence on species distributions in space (Liautaud et al, 2019), we describe this case in Appendix A3.…”

Section: Species Growth and Niche Constructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecotone formation through ecological niche construction: the role of biodiversity and species interactions

Liautaud

Barbier

Loreau

2019

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Rapid changes in species composition, also known as ecotones, can result from various causes including rapid changes in environmental conditions, or physiological thresholds. The possibility that ecotones arise from ecological niche construction by ecosystem engineers has received little attention. In this study, we investigate how the diversity of ecosystem engineers, and their interactions, can give rise to ecotones. We build a spatially explicit dynamical model that couples a multispecies community and its abiotic environment. We use numerical simulations and analytical techniques to determine the biotic and abiotic conditions under which ecotone emergence is expected to occur, and the role of biodiversity therein. We show that the diversity of ecosystem engineers can lead to indirect interactions through the modification of their shared environment. These interactions, which can be either competitive or mutualistic, can lead to the emergence of discrete communities in space, separated by sharp ecotones where a high species turnover is observed. Considering biodiversity is thus critical when studying the influence of species-environment interactions on the emergence of ecotones. This is especially true for the wide range of species that have small to moderate effects on their environment. Our work highlights new mechanisms by which biodiversity loss could cause significant changes in spatial community patterns in changing environments.

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Superorganisms or loose collections of species? A unifying theory of community patterns along environmental gradients

Cited by 67 publications

References 73 publications

Fitness and community feedbacks: the two axes that drive long-term invasion impacts

Fitness and community feedbacks: the two axes that drive long-term invasion impacts

Understanding the evolution of interspecies interactions in microbial communities

Ecotone formation through ecological niche construction: the role of biodiversity and species interactions

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