The Roles of Harsh and Fluctuating Conditions in the Dynamics of Ecological Communities

Nonmanipulative determination of plant community dynamics

Knowledge of the strengths of interactions between species in plant communities is of fundamental importance to our understanding of how communities are structured, although they are notoriously difficult to quantify. Techniques have recently been developed that allow the detailed enumeration of the strength of interactions between plant species within unmanipulated multispecies communities. Nonlinear regression analysis is used to fit competition models to long-term census data using natural variations in plant densities in lieu of manipulation. The models generated have been used to infer the intensity and importance of interactions as well as to analyse the effects of spatial and temporal variability. Theoretical work has begun to look at how different techniques for measuring competition perform in a range of systems, highlighting the importance of spatial scale. The lessons learned from applying these methods will enable improved estimation of the strength of competition in natural communities.

Human-caused environmental change: impacts on plant diversity and evolution

Human-caused environmental changes are creating regional combinations of environmental conditions that, within the next 50 to 100 years, may fall outside the envelope within which many of the terrestrial plants of a region evolved. These environmental modifications might become a greater cause of global species extinction than direct habitat destruction. The environmental constraints undergoing human modification include levels of soil nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium and pH, atmospheric CO(2), herbivore, pathogen, and predator densities, disturbance regimes, and climate. Extinction would occur because the physiologies, morphologies, and life histories of plants limit each species to being a superior competitor for a particular combination of environmental constraints. Changes in these constraints would favor a few species that would competitively displace many other species from a region. In the long-term, the "weedy" taxa that became the dominants of the novel conditions imposed by global change should become the progenitors of a series of new species that are progressively less weedy and better adapted to the new conditions. The relative importance of evolutionary versus community ecology responses to global environmental change would depend on the extent of regional and local recruitment limitation, and on whether the suite of human-imposed constraints were novel just regionally or on continental or global scales.

Disturbance and diversity in experimental microcosms

External agents of mortality (disturbances) occur over a wide range of scales of space and time, and are believed to have large effects on species diversity. The "intermediate disturbance hypothesis", which proposes maximum diversity at intermediate frequencies of disturbance, has received support from both field and laboratory studies. Coexistence of species at intermediate frequencies of disturbance is thought to require trade-offs between competitive ability and disturbance tolerance, and a metapopulation structure, with disturbance affecting only a few patches at any given time. However, a unimodal relationship can also be generated by global disturbances that affect all patches simultaneously, provided that the environment contains spatial niches to which different species are adapted. Here we report the results of tests of this model using both isogenic and diverse populations of the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens. In both cases, a unimodal relationship between diversity and disturbance frequency was generated in heterogeneous, but not in homogeneous, environments. The cause of this relationship is competition among niche-specialist genotypes, which maintains diversity at intermediate disturbance, but not at high or low disturbance. Our results show that disturbance can modulate the effect of spatial heterogeneity on biological diversity in natural environments.

General theory of competitive coexistence in spatially-varying environments

A general model of competitive and apparent competitive interactions in a spatially-variable environment is developed and analyzed to extend findings on coexistence in a temporally-variable environment to the spatial case and to elucidate new principles. In particular, coexistence mechanisms are divided into variation-dependent and variation-independent mechanisms with variation-dependent mechanisms including spatial generalizations of relative nonlinearity and the storage effect. Although directly analogous to the corresponding temporal mechanisms, these spatial mechanisms involve different life history traits which suggest that the spatial storage effect should arise more commonly than the temporal storage effect and spatial relative nonlinearity should arise less commonly than temporal relative nonlinearity. Additional mechanisms occur in the spatial case due to spatial covariance between the finite rate of increase of a local population and its local abundance, which has no clear temporal analogue. A limited analysis of these additional mechanisms shows that they have similar properties to the storage effect and relative nonlinearity and potentially may be considered as enlargements of the earlier mechanisms. The rate of increase of a species perturbed to low density is used to quantify coexistence. A general quadratic approximation, which is exact in some important cases, divides this rate of increase into contributions from the various mechanisms above and admits no other mechanisms, suggesting that opportunities for coexistence in a spatially-variable environment are fully characterized by these mechanisms within this general model. Three spatially-implicit models are analyzed as illustrations of the general findings and of techniques using small variance approximations. The contributions to coexistence of the various mechanisms are expressed in terms of simple interpretable formulae. These spatially-implicit models include a model of an annual plant community, a spatial multispecies version of the lottery model, and a multispecies model of an insect community competing for spatially-patchy and ephemeral food.

Strategy Space and the Disturbance Spectrum: A Life-History Model for Tree Species Coexistence

The disturbance spectrum consists of disturbance patterns differing in type, size, intensity, and frequency. It is proposed that tree life-history traits are adaptations to particular disturbance regimes. Four independent axes are proposed to define the dominant dimensions of tree strategy space: shade tolerance, tree height, capacity for vegetative reproduction, and seed dispersal distance. A fitness model was developed to elucidate interactions between the proposed life-history traits. The model shows how alternate life-history sets can coexist when disturbance patterns fluctuate in space and time. Variable disturbance regimes were shown, based on data and simulation results, to enhance species coexistence, as predicted. The strategy space model accurately predicts the number of common tree species for the eastern United States, boreal Canada, and southwestern piñon-juniper woodlands. The model also provides an explanation for latitudinal gradients in tree species richness in North America and Europe. The proposed model predicts a relationship between disturbance characteristics and the species composition of a forest that allows for the coexistence of large numbers of species. The life-history traits of size, growth rate, life span, shade tolerance, age of reproduction, seed dispersal distance, and vegetative reproduction are all incorporated into the model.

Determinants of the abundance of invasive annual weeds: community structure and non-equilibrium dynamics

The dynamics of an annual pasture community are described from a five-year experimental and monitoring study. The community was dominated by two grasses (Lolium rigidum and Vulpia bromoides) and a legume (Trifolium subterraneum). Fits of population dynamic models to per capita rates of population change indicate that interactions between the grasses were generally strong, while interactions between the grasses and legumes were weaker. Most, but not all, of the net effects of competition on population growth could be attributed to interactions occurring during plant growth. Phase-plane analysis indicated that, for a constant environment, a joint equilibrium of the two grasses is unstable since interspecific competition between Lolium and Vulpia is stronger than intraspecific competition. Consequently, the community will tend to a mixture of only one or other of the grass species and T. subterraneum, depending on the founding composition of the pasture. Analysis of data taken from a year in which a drought occurred (1993-1994) demonstrated profound effects on all three species. Modelling of the long-term impacts of the effects of repeated droughts showed that disturbance of this form overrides the founder effect observed under constant conditions. Consequently, Vulpia is ultimately able to invade any mixture of the other species in environments where stochastic disturbances occur.

The diversity-stability debate

There exists little doubt that the Earth's biodiversity is declining. The Nature Conservancy, for example, has documented that one-third of the plant and animal species in the United States are now at risk of extinction. The problem is a monumental one, and forces us to consider in depth how we expect ecosystems, which ultimately are our life-support systems, to respond to reductions in diversity. This issue--commonly referred to as the diversity-stability debate--is the subject of this review, which synthesizes historical ideas with recent advances. Both theory and empirical evidence agree that we should expect declines in diversity to accelerate the simplification of ecological communities.

Species coexistence by permanent spatial heterogeneity in a lottery model

We studied the effect of permanent spatial heterogeneity in promoting species coexistence in a lottery model. The system consisted of multiple habitats, each composed of a number of sites occupied by adults of two species. Larvae produced from different habitats were mixed in a common pool. When an adult died, the vacant site became occupied by an individual randomly chosen from the larval pool. If there were n habitats, there could be up to n-1 internal equilibria with both species in addition to two single-species equilibria. These equilibria and their local stability can be calculated from a single function, indicating the difference among species in their average lifetime reproductive success. Our main result is that between-habitat variation in the ratio of mortalities of two species promotes coexistence, while that of reproductive rates does not. This conclusion is the opposite of the role of temporal variation in the standard lottery model, in which between-year variation in the reproductive rate, but not that in the mortalities, promotes coexistence.

Fluctuating Environments and Phytoplankton Community Structure: A Stochastic Model

Spatial heterogeneity in organism and resource distributions can generate temporal heterogeneity in resource access for simple organisms like phytoplankton. The role of temporal heterogeneity as a structuring force for simple communities is investigated via models of phytoplankton with contrasting life histories competing for a single fluctuating resource. A stochastic model in which environmental and demographic stochasticity are treated separately is compared with a model with deterministic resource variation to assess the importance of stochasticity. When compared with the deterministic model, the stochastic model allows for coexistence over a wider range of parameter values (or life-history types). The model suggests that demographic stochasticity alone is far more important in increasing the possibility of coexistence than environmental stochasticity alone. However, the combined effects of both types of stochasticity produce the largest likelihood of coexistence. Finally, the influence of relative nutrient levels and nutrient pulse frequency on these results is addressed. We relate our findings to variable environment theory with evidence for both relative nonlinearity and the storage effect acting in this model. We show for the first time that temporal dynamics generated by demographic stochasticity may operate like the storage effect at particular spatial scales.

Immigration and the Maintenance of Local Species Diversity

Explaining the maintenance of high local species diversity in communities governed by competition for space has been a long-standing problem in ecology. We present a simple theoretical model to explore the influence of immigration from an external source on local coexistence, species abundance patterns, and ecosystem processes in plant communities. The model is built after classical metapopulation models but is applied to competition for space between individuals and includes immigration by a propagule rain and an extinction threshold for rare species. Our model shows that immigration can have a huge effect on local species diversity in competitive communities where competition for space would lead to the exclusion of all but one species if the community were closed. Local species richness is expected to increase strongly when immigration intensity increases beyond the threshold required for the successful establishment of one or a few individuals. Community structure and species relative abundances are also expected to change markedly with immigration intensity. Increasing immigration causes total space occupation by the community to increase but primary productivity on average to either decrease or stay constant with increasing diversity, depending on the relation between immigration and local reproduction rates. These results stress the need for a regional perspective to understand the processes that determine species diversity, species abundance patterns, and ecosystem functioning in local communities.

Similar non-random processes maintain diversity in two tropical rainforests

Quadrat-based analysis of two rainforest plots of area 50 ha, one in Panama (Barro Colorado Island, BCI) and the other in Malaysia (Pasoh), shows that in both plots recruitment is in general negatively correlated with both numbers and biomass of adult trees of the same species in the same quadrat. At BCI, this effect is not significantly influenced by treefall gaps. In both plots, recruitment of individual species is negatively correlated with the numbers of trees of all species in the quadrats, but not with overall biomass. These observations suggest, but do not prove, widespread frequency-dependent effects produced by pathogens and seed-predators that act most effectively in quadrats crowded with trees. Within-species correlations of mortality with numbers or biomass are not found in either plot, indicating that most frequency-dependent mortality takes place before the trees reach 1 cm in diameter. Stochastic effects caused by BCI's more rapid tree turnover may contribute to a larger variance in diversity from quadrat to quadrat at BCI, although they are not sufficient to explain why BCI has fewer than half as many tree species as Pasoh. Finally, in both plots quadrats with low diversity show a significant increase in diversity over time, and this increase is stronger at BCI. This process, like the frequency-dependence, will tend to maintain diversity over time. In general, these non-random forces that should lead to the maintenance of diversity are slightly stronger at BCI, even though the BCI plot is less diverse than the Pasoh plot.