International agreements aim to conserve 17% of Earth's land area by 2020 but include no area-based conservation targets within the working landscapes that support human needs through farming, ranching, and forestry. Through a review 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.
13Theory argues that both soil conditions and aboveground trophic interactions are equally important for 14 determining plant species diversity. However, it remains unexplored how they modify the niche di erences 15 that stabilise species coexistence and the average fitness di erences driving competitive dominance. 16We conducted a field study in Mediterranean annual grasslands to parameterise population models 17 of six competing plant species. Spatially explicit floral visitor assemblages and soil salinity variation . CC-BY 4.0 International license It is made available under a (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.The copyright holder for this preprint . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/170423 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jul. 31, 2017; Introduction 27Understanding the mechanisms that maintain species diversity is a central aim in ecology. Although 28 species interact with the environment and with many other species in complex ways, ecologists have 29 traditionally assumed that the importance of biotic and abiotic factors in promoting species diversity is 30 highly asymmetrical. Competition driven by soil conditions is commonly considered to be the primary 31 driver of plant coexistence, and therefore it has been extensively explored (Raynaud & Leadley 2004; 32 Tilman 2006; Craine & Dybzinski 2013; Hendriks et al. 2015). For instance, di erences in the species' 33 ability to drawdown limiting resources such as nitrogen and phosphorous is a classic textbook example 34 illustrating the importance of partitioning soil resources for maintaining species diversity (Tilman 1994). 35On top of this, multitrophic interactions such as those occurring between plant and pollinators, 36 pathogens, or mycorrhizae (Fitter 1977; Bastolla et al. 2009; Bagchi et al. 2014; Parker et al. 2015; 37 Bennett et al. 2017), are thought to play a secondary role in structuring plant communities. 38However, recent work has challenged this view. Chesson & Kuang (2008) presented clear evidence that 39 there is no theoretical support that the relative importance of competition driven by soil conditions 40 versus other kinds of multitrophic interactions is asymmetrical. In fact, they argue that these two types 41 of interactions are equally able to either limit or promote diversity. Competition mediated by other 42 trophic levels has been largely studied under the concept of apparent competition (Holt 1977), which 43 specifically describes how species within a trophic level (e.g. plants) can produce indirect competitive 44 e ects on others via shared enemies (e.g. herbivores, predators). These indirect e ects can be of equal 45 magnitude to that of direct e ects resulting from resource competition. The utility of this concept has 46 also been extended to apparent negative and positive interactions mediated by other organisms, such as 47 shared mutualisms (Morris et al. 2004; Carvalheiro et al. 2014). . CC-BY 4.0 International license I...
Ecological theory predicts that species interactions embedded in multitrophic networks shape the opportunities for species to persist. However, the lack of experimental support of this prediction has limited our understanding of how species interactions occurring within and across trophic levels simultaneously regulate the maintenance of biodiversity. Here, we integrate a mathematical approach and detailed experiments in plant–pollinator communities to demonstrate the need to jointly account for species interactions within and across trophic levels when estimating the ability of species to persist. Within the plant trophic level, we show that the persistence probability of plant species increases when introducing the effects of plant–pollinator interactions. Across trophic levels, we show that the persistence probabilities of both plants and pollinators exhibit idiosyncratic changes when experimentally manipulating the multitrophic structure. Importantly, these idiosyncratic effects are not recovered by traditional simulations. Our work provides tractable experimental and theoretical platforms upon which it is possible to investigate the multitrophic factors affecting species persistence in ecological communities.
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