Size matters in regulating the biodiversity of tropical forest soils

Molecular Ecology
Alex J Dumbrell

Abstract

Tropical forests have long fascinated ecologists, inspiring a plethora of research into the mechanisms regulating their immense biodiversity, which originally captured the interests of early natural historians and explorers, and that still persists to this day. A new focus of this research emerged in the early 2000s highlighting the potential role of neutral (stochastic) processes in regulating the composition and diversity of tropical forest communities, and thus the maintenance of a large portion of global biodiversity (Hubbell, ). This strictly contrasted the long-held belief that communities assembled via the sorting of species (and their abundances) via a deterministic response to local abiotic and biotic environmental conditions, reflecting the niche of each species (Leibold & McPeek, ). Yet, it is unlikely that the assembly of any community is solely governed by either stochastic or deterministic processes, but instead a combination of both. However, whether deterministic processes via niche-based environmental sorting of species, or stochastic processes reflecting pattens of dispersal limitation, neutral effects and ecological drift dominate is often unclear. This prompts questions as to whether the relative influence o...Continue Reading

References

Jul 28, 2006·Ecology·Mathew A Leibold, Mark A McPeek
Sep 27, 2014·Global Change Biology·Kristina J Anderson-TeixeiraJess Zimmerman
Nov 28, 2014·Nature·Richard D Bardgett, Wim H van der Putten
Apr 1, 2017·Trends in Ecology & Evolution·David A BohanGuy Woodward
Oct 31, 2018·Molecular Ecology·Lucie ZingerJérôme Chave

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Citations

Jan 10, 2020·Molecular Ecology·Loren RiesebergPierre Taberlet
Nov 26, 2020·Environmental Health Perspectives·Jake M RobinsonMartin F Breed

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