An Assembly Rule for Functional Groups Applied to North American Soricid Communities

Fox, Barry J.; Kirkland, Gordon L.

doi:10.2307/1382015

Cited by 53 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…It implies that species interactions play a major role in structuring communities. Subsequently, this model and an extended version (Kelt, Taper & Meserve, 1995) were tested and confirmed with various small mammal communities from America and Australia (Fox & Kirkland, 1992;Fox & Brown, 1993;Kelt et ul., 1995) and is also consistent with the composition of European small mammal communities (Schropfer, 1990).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Test of Fox's assembly rule for functional groups in lemur communities in Madagascar

Ganzhorn

1997

Journal of Zoology

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With 2 figures in the text)This paper examines to what extent an assembly rule designed by Fox for sinall terrestrial mammal communities is also applicable to communities of arboreal lemurs in Madagascar. This approach extends the testing of Fox's assembly rule to a new biogeographic region and a different phylogenetic radiation. The rule operates on a functional rather than on the taxonomic level. It specifies that: "There is a much higher probability that each species entering a community will be drawn from a different functional group ... until each group is represented before the cycle repeats" (Fox, 1987: 201). This rule was tested with lemur communities from 14 sites in evergreen rain forests and nine sites in dry deciduous forests of Madagascar. Lemur species were assigned to one of three different functional groups based on dietary preferences: omnivores, frugivores, folivores. The rule applies almost perfectly to extant lemur communities in evergreen rain forest. Present communities in dry deciduous foresta are not ordered as perfectly as coininunities of the rain forest sites, but they also deviate from random assembly as generated by the null model. Including extinct species of the dry forest ecosystem indicates that the at present unfavoured composition of the lemur community has been derived from a favoured $$ate through exlinction of the large folivorous and frugivorous lemur species. In the lemur communities of the eastern Malagasy rain forest, the assembly went through at least four, and in the Holocene dry forest ecosystem through even five, cycles without failing. This assigns considerable significance to the underlying mechanisms (most likely interspecific competition) and indicates that they are still effective in the forests of Madagascar. The dry deciduous forests might have been subject to recent natural and anthropogenic changes which interfere with the operation of these deterministic processes.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Test of Fox's assembly rule for functional groups in lemur communities in Madagascar

Ganzhorn

1997

Journal of Zoology

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“…When regionally co-occurring species belong to two or more functional groups, their assembly within a particular community represents a pronounced non-random component of the overall set of possible residents (Fox 1987(Fox ,1989Fox and Kirkland 1992, Fox and Brown 1993. Coexisting mammals often obey the probabilistic rule that community assembly fills "each functional group with an equal number of species before adding an additional species of any other group" (Brown et al 2000).…”

Section: Species Assemblymentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward an ecological synthesis: a case for habitat selection

2003

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Habitat selection, and its associated density and frequency-dependent evolution, has a profound influence on such vital phenomena as population regulation, species interactions, the assembly of ecological communities, and the origin and maintenance of biodiversity. Different strategies of habitat selection, and their importance in ecology and evolution, can often be revealed simply by plots of density in adjacent habitats. For individual species, the strategies are closely intertwined with mechanisms of population regulation, and with the persistence of populations through time. For interacting species, strategies of habitat selection are not only responsible for species coexistence, but provide one of the most convenient mechanisms for measuring competition, and the various community structures caused by competitive interactions. Other kinds of interactions, such as those between predators and prey, demonstrate that an understanding of the coevolution of habitat-selection strategies among strongly interacting species is essential to properly interpret their spatial and temporal dynamics. At the evolutionary scale, the frequency dependence associated with habitat selection may often allow populations to diverge and diversify into separate species. Habitat selection thereby demonstrates how we can map microevolutionary strategies in behavior onto their population and community consequences, and from there, onto macroevolutionary patterns of speciation and adaptive radiation. We can anticipate that future studies of habitat selection will not only help us complete those maps, but that they will also continue to enrich the panoply of ideas that shape evolutionary ecology.

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“…Embracing the functional approach allowed Fox (1987) to hypothesize a general guild assembly rule: species are added to a community from those guilds not represented at a given time, and only after all guilds are represented do additional species from any given guild persist in the community (see also Fox 1989Fox , 1999Brown 1993, 1995;Fox and Kirkland 1992). The Fox (1987) hypothesis has received some support in small mammal communities (Brown et al 2000(Brown et al , 2002Fox 1999;Brown 1993, 1995; but see Simberloff et al 1999;Stone et al 1996Stone et al , 2000.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Functional trait assembly through ecological and evolutionary time

Stegen

Swenson

2009

Theor Ecol

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A classic community assembly hypothesis is that all guilds must be represented before additional species from any given guild enter the community. We conceptually extend this hypothesis to continuous functional traits, refine the hypothesis with an eco-evolutionary model of interaction network community assembly, and compare the resultant continuous trait assembly rule to empirical data. Our extension of the "guild assembly rule" to continuous functional traits was rejected, in part, because the eco-evolutionary model predicted trait assembly to be characterized by the expansion of trait space and trait/species sorting within trait space. Hence, the guild rule may not be broadly applicable. A "revised" assembly rule did, however, emerge from the eco-evolutionary model: as communities assemble, the range in trait values will increase to a maximum and then remain relatively constant irrespective of further changes in species richness. This rule makes the corollary prediction that the trait range will, on average, be a saturating function of species richness. To determine if the assembly rule is at work in natural communities, we compared this corollary prediction to empirical data. Consistent with our assembly rule, trait "space" (broadly defined) commonly saturates with species richness. Our assembly rule may thus represent a general constraint placed on community assembly. In addition, taxonomic scale similarly influences the predicted and empirically observed relationship between trait "space" and richness. Empirical support for the model's predictions suggests that studying continuous functional traits in the context of eco-evolutionary models is a powerful approach for elucidating general processes of community assembly.

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An Assembly Rule for Functional Groups Applied to North American Soricid Communities

Cited by 53 publications

References 32 publications

Test of Fox's assembly rule for functional groups in lemur communities in Madagascar

Test of Fox's assembly rule for functional groups in lemur communities in Madagascar

Toward an ecological synthesis: a case for habitat selection

Functional trait assembly through ecological and evolutionary time

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