Immigration rates and species niche characteristics affect the relationship between species richness and habitat heterogeneity in modeled meta-communities

PeerJ
Avi Bar-Massada

Abstract

The positive relationship between habitat heterogeneity and species richness is a cornerstone of ecology. Recently, it was suggested that this relationship should be unimodal rather than linear due to a tradeoff between environmental heterogeneity and population sizes. Increased environmental heterogeneity will decrease effective habitat sizes, which in turn will increase the rate of local species extinctions. The occurrence of the unimodal richness-heterogeneity relationship at the habitat scale was confirmed in both empirical and theoretical studies. However, it is unclear whether it can occur at broader spatial scales, for meta-communities in diverse and patchy landscapes. Here, I used a spatially explicit meta-community model to quantify the roles of two species-level characteristics, niche width and immigration rates, on the type of the richness-heterogeneity relationship at the landscape scale. I found that both positive and unimodal richness-heterogeneity relationships can occur in meta-communities in patchy landscapes. The type of the relationship was affected by the interactions between inter-patch immigration rates and species' niche widths. Unimodal relationships were prominent in meta-communities comprising species ...Continue Reading

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Sep 24, 2013·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Omri AlloucheRonen Kadmon
Mar 29, 2014·Proceedings. Biological Sciences·Avi Bar-MassadaYohay Carmel

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Citations

Nov 7, 2019·Ecology Letters·Eyal Ben-Hur, Ronen Kadmon
Feb 20, 2020·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Eyal Ben-Hur, Ronen Kadmon

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