Quantifying the Impact of Competition and Spatial Heterogeneity on the Structure and Dynamics of a Four-Species Guild of Winter Annuals

Rees, Mark; Grubb, P. J.; Kelly, Dave

doi:10.1086/285837

Cited by 208 publications

(260 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Annual plant assemblages are often characterized by a high degree of disturbance (Rees 1995;Turnbull et al 1999;Coomes et al 2002), and in some of these systems, the observed relative abundance patterns may be transient effects of fecundity differences as in figure 4D. However, where these patterns persist from year to year (e.g., Grubb et al 1982;Rees et al 1996), transient dynamics cannot explain community structure.…”

Section: Coexistence In Nonspatial and Spatial Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A second community pattern, which is more specific to these systems, is the negative correlation between seed size and abundance ( fig. 2; Grubb et al 1982;Maranon and Grubb 1993;Rees 1995;Pake and Venable 1996;Rees et al 1996;Guo et al 2000;Coomes et al 2002). The smallest-seeded, bestcolonizing species tend to be the most common, while the largest-seeded, competitive species are the least abundant.…”

Section: Species Traits and Abundance Patterns In Annual Plant Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…B, Density (number/m 2 ) of annuals across eight British dune systems (Rees 1995). C, Density (number/m 2 averaged over 10 yr and two sites) of annuals in the Holkham dune system studied by Grubb et al (1982) and Rees et al (1996). D, Density (number/m 2 averaged over 3 yr) of winter annuals in an Arizona desert community (Pake and Venable 1996).…”

Section: Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Coexistence and Relative Abundance in Annual Plant Assemblages: The Roles of Competition and Colonization

Levine

Rees

2002

The American Naturalist

142

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Article: Levine, J.M. and Rees, M. (2002) Coexistence and relative abundance in annual plant assemblages: The roles of competition and colonization. American Naturalist, 160 (4). pp. [452][453][454][455][456][457][458][459][460][461][462][463][464][465][466][467] eprints@whiterose.ac.uk https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Reuse Unless indicated otherwise, fulltext items are protected by copyright with all rights reserved. The copyright exception in section 29 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 allows the making of a single copy solely for the purpose of non-commercial research or private study within the limits of fair dealing. The publisher or other rights-holder may allow further reproduction and re-use of this version -refer to the White Rose Research Online record for this item. Where records identify the publisher as the copyright holder, users can verify any specific terms of use on the publisher's website. TakedownIf you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing eprints@whiterose.ac.uk including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. abstract: Although an interspecific trade-off between competitive and colonizing ability can permit multispecies coexistence, whether this mechanism controls the structure of natural systems remains unresolved. We used models to evaluate the hypothesized importance of this trade-off for explaining coexistence and relative abundance patterns in annual plant assemblages. In a nonspatial model, empirically derived competition-colonization trade-offs related to seed mass were insufficient to generate coexistence. This was unchanged by spatial structure or interspecific variation in the fraction of seeds dispersing globally. These results differ from those of the more generalized competition-colonization models because the latter assume completely asymmetric competition, an assumption that appears unrealistic considering existing data for annual systems. When, for heuristic purposes, completely asymmetric competition was incorporated into our models, unlimited coexistence was possible. However, in the resulting abundance patterns, the best competitors/poorest colonizers were the most abundant, the opposite of that observed in natural systems. By contrast, these natural patterns were produced by competition-colonization models where environmental heterogeneity permitted species coexistence. Thus, despite the failure of the simple competition-colonization trade-off to explain coexistence in annual plant systems, this trade-off may be essential to explaining relative abundance patterns when other processes permit coexistence.

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Section: Coexistence In Nonspatial and Spatial Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Species Traits and Abundance Patterns In Annual Plant Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Coexistence and Relative Abundance in Annual Plant Assemblages: The Roles of Competition and Colonization

Levine

Rees

2002

The American Naturalist

142

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“…Individual plants typically interact more with nearby than with distant individuals (Rees et al, 1996;Tilman et al, 1997). Consequently, an introduction's success or failure can depend on effects regulated by neighborhood, rather than global, densities (Higgins et al, 1996;Wilson, 1998).…”

Section: Spatial Model For Invader -Resident Competitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatial dynamics of invasion: the geometry of introduced species

Korniss

Caraco

2005

Journal of Theoretical Biology

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Many exotic species combine low probability of establishment at each introduction with rapid population growth once introduction does succeed. To analyze this phenomenon, we note that invaders often cluster spatially when rare, and consequently an introduced exotic's population dynamics should depend on locally structured interactions. Ecological theory for spatially structured invasion relies on deterministic approximations, and determinism does not address the observed uncertainty of the exotic-introduction process. We take a new approach to the population dynamics of invasion and, by extension, to the general question of invasibility in any spatial ecology. We apply the physical theory for nucleation of spatial systems to a lattice-based model of competition between plant species, a resident and an invader, and the analysis reaches conclusions that differ qualitatively from the standard ecological theories. Nucleation theory distinguishes between dynamics of single-cluster and multi-cluster invasion. Low introduction rates and small system size produce single-cluster dynamics, where success or failure of introduction is inherently stochastic. Single-cluster invasion occurs only if the cluster reaches a critical size, typically preceded by a number of failed attempts. For this case, we identify the functional form of the probability distribution of time elapsing until invasion succeeds. Although multi-cluster invasion for sufficiently large systems exhibits spatial averaging and almostdeterministic dynamics of the global densities, an analytical approximation from nucleation theory, known as Avrami's law, describes our simulation results far better than standard ecological approximations.

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“…Competitively superior species become suppressed, which in turn prevents or at least retards the elimination of competitively inferior species. Altering the speed of competitive exclusion can tip the balance from competitive exclusion to coexistence and, thus, promote species diversity (Kareiva 1990, Tilman 1994, Rees et al 1996, Pacala 1997, Stoll and Weiner 2000. Experimental tests of competitive interactions with randomly or regularly dispersed plants can therefore give misleading results.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intraspecific Aggregation Alters Competitive Interactions in Experimental Plant Communities

Stoll

Prati

2001

Ecology

140

236

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Abstract. We tested the prediction from spatial competition models that intraspecific aggregation may promote coexistence and thus maintain biodiversity with experimental communities of four annual species. Monocultures, three-species mixtures, and the fourspecies mixture were sown at two densities and with either random or intraspecifically aggregated distributions. There was a hierarchy of competitive abilities among the four species. The weaker competitors showed higher aboveground biomass in the aggregated distribution compared to the random distribution, especially at high density. In one species, intraspecific aggregation resulted in an 86% increase in the number of flowering individuals and a 171% increase in the reproductive biomass at high density. The competitively superior species had a lower biomass in the aggregated distribution than in the random distribution at high density. The data support the hypothesis that the spatial distribution of plants profoundly affects competition in such a way that weaker competitors increase their fitness while stronger competitors are suppressed when grown in the neighborhood of conspecifics. This implies that the spatial arrangement of plants in a community can be an important determinant of species coexistence and biodiversity.

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Quantifying the Impact of Competition and Spatial Heterogeneity on the Structure and Dynamics of a Four-Species Guild of Winter Annuals

Cited by 208 publications

References 40 publications

Coexistence and Relative Abundance in Annual Plant Assemblages: The Roles of Competition and Colonization

Coexistence and Relative Abundance in Annual Plant Assemblages: The Roles of Competition and Colonization

Spatial dynamics of invasion: the geometry of introduced species

Intraspecific Aggregation Alters Competitive Interactions in Experimental Plant Communities

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