Opposing community assembly patterns for dominant and nondominant plant species in herbaceous ecosystems globally |
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Author: | Arnillas, Carlos Alberto1; Borer, Elizabeth T.2; Seabloom, Eric W.2; |
Organizations: |
1Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences, University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, ON, Canada 2University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA 3Instituto de Investigaciones Marinas y Costeras (IIMyC, UNMdP, CONICET), Mar del Plata, Argentina
4Department of Biology, Escuela Politécnica Nacional, Quito, Ecuador
5School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA 6Archbold Biological Station, Venus, Florida, USA 7School of Natural Sciences, Zoology, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland 8Centre for Applied Ecology Prof. Baeta Neves (CEABN-InBIO), School of Agriculture, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal 9University of Queensland, School of Biological Sciences, ST-Lucia, Qld, Australia 10Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Brisbane, Qld, Australia 11Department of Zoology and Entomology, Mammal Research Institute, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa 12Ecology and Biodiversity Group, Department of Biology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands 13Institute of Ecology and Earth Sciences, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia 14Department of Disturbance Ecology, BayCEER, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany 15Department of Health and Environmental Sciences, Xi'an Jiaotong Liverpool University, Suzhou, China 16School of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA 17Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Edgewater, Maryland, USA 18Department of Agricutural and Environmental Sciences, Estonian University of Life Sciences, Tartu, Estonia 19Poly Prep Country Day School, Brooklyn, New York, USA 20Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, USA 21School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Clayton, Vic, Australia 22La Trobe University, Bundoora, Vic, Australia 23INTA-UNPA-CONICET, Rio Gallegos, Santa Cruz, Argentina 24Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University, Penrith, Australia 25Institute for Land, Water and Society, Charles Sturt University, Albury, NSW, Australia 26National Centre for Biological Sciences, TIFR, Bengaluru, India 27School of Biology, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK 28Algoma University, Sault Ste. Marie, ON, Canada 29Grupo de Investigaciones en Biología de la Conservación, Laboratorio Ecotono, INIBIOMA (CONICET-UNCOMA), San Carlos de Bariloche, Río Negro, Argentina 30Environmental and Conservation Sciences, College of Science, Health, Engineering and Education, Murdoch University, Murdoch, Western Australia, Australia 31Ecology and Genetics, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland 32Department of Biological Sciences, University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, ON, Canada 33Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada |
Format: | article |
Version: | published version |
Access: | open |
Online Access: | PDF Full Text (PDF, 1.2 MB) |
Persistent link: | http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi-fe2022021118673 |
Language: | English |
Published: |
John Wiley & Sons,
2021
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Publish Date: | 2022-02-11 |
Description: |
AbstractBiotic and abiotic factors interact with dominant plants—the locally most frequent or with the largest coverage—and nondominant plants differently, partially because dominant plants modify the environment where nondominant plants grow. For instance, if dominant plants compete strongly, they will deplete most resources, forcing nondominant plants into a narrower niche space. Conversely, if dominant plants are constrained by the environment, they might not exhaust available resources but instead may ameliorate environmental stressors that usually limit nondominants. Hence, the nature of interactions among nondominant species could be modified by dominant species. Furthermore, these differences could translate into a disparity in the phylogenetic relatedness among dominants compared to the relatedness among nondominants. By estimating phylogenetic dispersion in 78 grasslands across five continents, we found that dominant species were clustered (e.g., co-dominant grasses), suggesting dominant species are likely organized by environmental filtering, and that nondominant species were either randomly assembled or overdispersed. Traits showed similar trends for those sites (<50%) with sufficient trait data. Furthermore, several lineages scattered in the phylogeny had more nondominant species than expected at random, suggesting that traits common in nondominants are phylogenetically conserved and have evolved multiple times. We also explored environmental drivers of the dominant/nondominant disparity. We found different assembly patterns for dominants and nondominants, consistent with asymmetries in assembly mechanisms. Among the different postulated mechanisms, our results suggest two complementary hypotheses seldom explored: (1) Nondominant species include lineages adapted to thrive in the environment generated by dominant species. (2) Even when dominant species reduce resources to nondominant ones, dominant species could have a stronger positive effect on some nondominants by ameliorating environmental stressors affecting them, than by depleting resources and increasing the environmental stress to those nondominants. These results show that the dominant/nondominant asymmetry has ecological and evolutionary consequences fundamental to understand plant communities. see all
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Series: |
Ecology and evolution |
ISSN: | 2045-7758 |
ISSN-E: | 2045-7758 |
ISSN-L: | 2045-7758 |
Volume: | 11 |
Issue: | 24 |
Pages: | 17744 - 17761 |
DOI: | 10.1002/ece3.8266 |
OADOI: | https://oadoi.org/10.1002/ece3.8266 |
Type of Publication: |
A1 Journal article – refereed |
Field of Science: |
1181 Ecology, evolutionary biology |
Subjects: | |
Funding: |
National Science Foundation, Grant/Award Number: NSF-DEB-1042132 and NSF-DEB-1234162; Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Grant/Award Number: 386151; Institute on the Environment, University of Minnesota, Grant/Award Number: DG-0001-13; Portuguese Science Foundation, Grant/Award Number: IF/01171/2014. |
Dataset Reference: |
Data and codes are available at: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.pzgms |
https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.pzgms |
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Copyright information: |
© 2021 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |