Diversity, Functional Similarity, and Top-Down Control Drive Synchronization and the Reliability of Ecosystem Function

Bauer, Barbara; Vos, Matthijs; Klauschies, Toni; Gaedke, Ursula

doi:10.1086/674906

Cited by 19 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 40 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…As a result, our species biomass dynamics for higher values of v and w look very similar to those of Tirok and Gaedke () and Bauer et al. (). However, in contrast to a functional type III response where the negative frequency dependence arises instantaneously at low densities, the reduction in grazing pressure on rare prey and the enhancement of grazing of rare predators in our model occur with time‐lags that are inversely proportional to v .…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

“…The stabilizing and equalizing effects of trait adaptation in our model are in line with previous model results (Tirok and Gaedke ; Bauer et al. ) where additional stabilizing and equalizing mechanisms were a priori introduced to ensure coexistence of multiple prey and predator species. Their functional response was similar to a type III functional response, and all predators were able to consume a certain amount of less edible prey buffering more selective predators from extinction when prey composition shifted toward less edible species.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

“…; Bauer et al. ) for planktonic systems consisting of phytoplankton and their ciliate predators (Hansen et al. ; Tirok and Gaedke ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Trait adaptation promotes species coexistence in diverse predator and prey communities

Klauschies

Vasseur

Gaedke

2016

Ecology and Evolution

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Species can adjust their traits in response to selection which may strongly influence species coexistence. Nevertheless, current theory mainly assumes distinct and time‐invariant trait values. We examined the combined effects of the range and the speed of trait adaptation on species coexistence using an innovative multispecies predator–prey model. It allows for temporal trait changes of all predator and prey species and thus simultaneous coadaptation within and among trophic levels. We show that very small or slow trait adaptation did not facilitate coexistence because the stabilizing niche differences were not sufficient to offset the fitness differences. In contrast, sufficiently large and fast trait adaptation jointly promoted stable or neutrally stable species coexistence. Continuous trait adjustments in response to selection enabled a temporally variable convergence and divergence of species traits; that is, species became temporally more similar (neutral theory) or dissimilar (niche theory) depending on the selection pressure, resulting over time in a balance between niche differences stabilizing coexistence and fitness differences promoting competitive exclusion. Furthermore, coadaptation allowed prey and predator species to cluster into different functional groups. This equalized the fitness of similar species while maintaining sufficient niche differences among functionally different species delaying or preventing competitive exclusion. In contrast to previous studies, the emergent feedback between biomass and trait dynamics enabled supersaturated coexistence for a broad range of potential trait adaptation and parameters. We conclude that accounting for trait adaptation may explain stable and supersaturated species coexistence for a broad range of environmental conditions in natural systems when the absence of such adaptive changes would preclude it. Small trait changes, coincident with those that may occur within many natural populations, greatly enlarged the number of coexisting species.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Trait adaptation promotes species coexistence in diverse predator and prey communities

Klauschies

Vasseur

Gaedke

2016

Ecology and Evolution

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In this study, we elected to use a metric developed by Loreau and de Mazancourt (2008) because it is greatly improved over previously proposed VR-style metrics (e.g., Frost et al 1995). The metric is less sensitive to community size effects compared to earlier VR metrics (though not immune; Bauer et al 2014), and the resulting statistic is standardized between 0 and 1 as opposed to other versions of VRs. For the VR we employed, 0 indicates perfect compensatory fluctuations between species while 1 indicates perfect synchrony (Loreau and de Mazancourt 2008).…”

Section: Measurement and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Compensatory dynamics stabilize aggregate community properties in response to multiple types of perturbations

Brown

Downing

Leibold

2016

Ecology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Compensatory dynamics are an important suite of mechanisms that can stabilize community and ecosystem attributes in systems subject to environmental fluctuations. However, few experimental investigations of compensatory dynamics have addressed these mechanisms in systems of real-world complexity, and existing evidence relies heavily on correlative analyses, retrospective examination, and experiments in simple systems. We investigated the potential for compensatory dynamics to stabilize plankton communities in plankton mesocosm systems of real-world complexity. We employed four types of perturbations including two types of nutrient pulses, shading, and acidification. To quantify how communities responded to these perturbations, we used a measure of community-wide synchrony combined with spectral analysis that allowed us to assess timescale-specific community dynamics, for example, whether dynamics were synchronous at some timescales but compensatory at others. The 150-d experiment produced 32-point time series of all zooplankton taxa in the mesocosms. We then used those time series to evaluate total zooplankton biomass as an aggregate property and to evaluate community dynamics. For three of our four perturbation types, total zooplankton biomass was significantly less variable in systems with environmental variation than in constant environments. For the same three perturbation types, community-wide synchrony was much lower in fluctuating environments than in the constant environment, particularly at longer timescales (periods ≈ 60 d). Additionally, there were strong negative correlations between population temporal variances and the level of community-wide synchrony. Taken together, these results strongly imply that compensatory interactions between species stabilized total biomass in response to perturbations. Diversity did not differ significantly across either treatments or perturbation types, thus ruling out several classes of mechanisms driven by changes in diversity. We also used several pieces of secondary evidence to evaluate the particular mechanism behind compensatory responses since a wide variety of mechanisms are hypothesized to produce compensatory dynamics. We concluded that fluctuation dependent endogenous cycles that occur as a consequence of consumer-resource interactions in competitive communities were the most likely explanation for the compensatory dynamics observed in our experiment. As with our previous work, scale-dependent dynamics were also a key to understanding compensatory dynamics in these experimental communities.

show abstract

“…, Bauer et al. , Scranton and Vasseur ), but because at the same time competition also increases population variability (Ives et al. , Loreau and de Mazancourt ), its overall effect on stability is uncertain.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Functional differences stabilize beetle communities by weakening interspecific temporal synchrony

Klink

Lepš

Vermeulen

et al. 2019

Ecology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The temporal stability of communities is essential for the maintenance of ecosystem functioning across trophic levels. The stabilizing effect of biodiversity is, among other factors, modulated by the level of synchrony in population fluctuations among the species in the community. What drives community synchrony, however, remains largely unclear. Community synchrony can be affected by external drivers such as disturbances, but also by the properties of the community. Species with different ecological strategies should fluctuate less synchronously than more similar species; thus, an increase in diversity of ecological strategies should decrease synchrony, and increase the stability of the community. Here, using an exceptionally large data set of ground beetle trappings in Dutch heathlands (~370,000 individuals in 19 plots, each sampled between 9 and 36 yr), we assess the drivers of community stability and synchrony, and their relationship with disturbance, species richness, and functional diversity (FD). We found no effect of disturbance (fire and topsoil removal) on community stability or synchrony, probably because of unpredictable patterns of increase or decrease of the populations. Community synchrony was overall positive, giving more support for independent and positive correlation between species than for compensatory dynamics. Synchrony decreased with increasing FD, but not with species richness. Supporting this, we found that the more species pairs differ in their traits, the less synchronously their populations fluctuate, where 74% of all pairs showed no significant correlation. Significant positive synchrony (19% of species pairs) was concentrated among pairs with low trait dissimilarity, and the 7% of pairs with significant negative temporal correlation showed no relation with pairwise functional dissimilarity. The stabilizing effect of FD via decreased synchrony supports largely untested theoretical expectations that an increased diversity of functional strategies in a community will have a stabilizing effect on community abundance. We hypothesize that because competition is low in this community, the stabilizing effect of FD reflects interspecific variation in responses to environmental fluctuations rather than competition.

show abstract

Diversity, Functional Similarity, and Top-Down Control Drive Synchronization and the Reliability of Ecosystem Function

Cited by 19 publications

References 40 publications

Trait adaptation promotes species coexistence in diverse predator and prey communities

Trait adaptation promotes species coexistence in diverse predator and prey communities

Compensatory dynamics stabilize aggregate community properties in response to multiple types of perturbations

Functional differences stabilize beetle communities by weakening interspecific temporal synchrony

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About