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

Ecology and Evolution
Laure GallienNiklaus E Zimmermann

Abstract

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 tempera...Continue Reading

References

Mar 1, 1986·The Quarterly Review of Biology·C W Welden, W L Slauson
Jun 21, 2002·Nature·Ragan M CallawayBradley J Cook
Aug 6, 2010·Oecologia·Bradley J Butterfield, John M Briggs
May 1, 1994·Trends in Ecology & Evolution·M D Bertness, R Callaway
Sep 18, 2012·The New Phytologist·Christian SchöbFrancisco I Pugnaire
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May 3, 2014·Global Ecology and Biogeography : a Journal of Macroecology·Tamara MünkemüllerWilfried Thuiller
May 27, 2017·Ecology Letters·Laure GallienPeter B Adler

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Citations

Mar 31, 2021·Nature Ecology & Evolution·Hong QianWilfried Thuiller
Jun 12, 2021·Trends in Plant Science·M VerdúC Schöb

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Methods Mentioned

BETA
environmental stress
PCA

Software Mentioned

VirtualCom
R package ade4

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