Signs of stabilisation and stable coexistence

Broekman, Maarten J. E.; Muller‐Landau, Helene C.; Visser, Marco D.; Jongejans, Eelke; Wright, S. Joseph; Kroon, Hans de

doi:10.1111/ele.13349

Cited by 59 publications

(102 citation statements)

References 101 publications

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“…Future challenges lie in uncovering the dynamic nature of feedback effects in time as well as in density-dependent competitive settings. Long-term density-dependent plant-soil feedback experiments will be vital assets in linking soil feedback fluctuations to plant community processes (Broekman et al, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Species abundance fluctuations over 31 years are associated with plant–soil feedback in a species‐rich mountain meadow

et al. 2020

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1. Increasing evidence suggest that plant-soil interactions play an essential role in plant community assembly processes. Empirical investigations show that plant species abundance in the field is often related to plant-soil biota interactions; however, the direction of these relations have yielded inconsistent results. 2. We combined unique 31-year long field data on species abundances from a species-rich mountain meadow with single time point plant-soil feedback greenhouse experiments of 24 co-occurring plant species. We tested whether these relations were dynamic in time, whether coupled increases and decreases in abundance between years were related to plant-soil feedback and whether these changes were underlain by years in which manuring was applied. 3. The prevailingly negative relationship between plant-soil feedback and plant relative abundance in the field was significantly time-dependent, which may reconcile the contrasting results in literature. Furthermore, significantly coupled oscillations appeared between species relative abundance changes and plant-soil feedback, which were likely moderated by years in which manuring was applied. Our results are consistent with the notion that the more abundant species are stabilised by negative plant-soil feedback, and the less abundant species co-vary with the fluctuations of these more competitive species. 4. Synthesis. Our results project plant-soil feedback as an important regulatory mechanism in plant communities, operating in conjunction with species' competitive ability and soil nutrient availability. We suggest that negative feedback is particularly prominent in more abundant plant species that profit from more readily available soil nutrients than less abundant species with positive feedback. Negative plant-soil feedback may thus prevent more abundant plant species from out-competing less abundant plant species, facilitating stable species coexistence .

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Species abundance fluctuations over 31 years are associated with plant–soil feedback in a species‐rich mountain meadow

et al. 2020

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“…Theoretically, coexistence is determined by comparing intra-and interspecific competition: one species has to limit itself more than limiting the other (Broekman et al 2019). However, weighted arithmetic means by population of each stage cannot fully represent competition experienced by a species in the current model: The most abundant stage (stage 1 juveniles) always experiences the most intense interspecific competition, resulting in overestimation of interaction strengths (Supporting Information, Section 2.1).…”

Section: Determination Of Competition Outcomementioning

confidence: 99%

Stage-mediated priority effects and season lengths shape long-term competition dynamics

Zou

Rudolf

2020

Preprint

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The relative arrival time of species often affects species interactions within a community, contributing to priority effects. Recent studies on phenological shifts under climate change have generated renewed interest on priority effects, but their role in shaping long-term dynamics of seasonal communities is poorly resolved. Here we use a general stage-structure competition model to determine how different types of priority effects influence long-term coexistence of species in seasonal systems. We show that while shifts in mean and variance of relative arrival time can alter persistence and coexistence conditions of species, these effects depend on season length and type of priority effect. In "slow" systems with one or a few cohorts per season, changes in mean and seasonal variation of relative arrival time strongly altered species persistence through trait-mediated priority effects. In contrast, competition outcome in "fast" systems is largely determined by numeric priority effects due to interaction between many overlapping generations. These results suggest that empirically observed priority effects may arise from fundamentally different mechanisms, and that fast-generating systems may be less impacted by seasonal variation in phenology. Our model provides important insight into how natural communities respond to increasing variation in phenology over seasons under climate change.

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“…For example, neutral models with a single interaction coefficient have adequately explained some patterns in ecological communities (Hubbell, ). In other cases, observations are better matched by models with separate intra‐ versus interspecific terms, reflecting that intraspecific effects often far outweigh interspecific effects (Adler et al, ; Broekman et al, in press). Alternatively, in some microbial and plant systems, models that include pairwise interactions among species produce more accurate estimates of species abundances (Carrara et al, ; Clark, Lehman, & Tilman, ; Vandermeer, ), potentially indicating species‐specific impacts on resource availability (Tilman, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting species abundances in a grassland biodiversity experiment: Trade‐offs between model complexity and generality

et al. 2019

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Models of natural processes necessarily sacrifice some realism for the sake of tractability. Detailed, parameter‐rich models often provide accurate estimates of system behaviour but can be data‐hungry and difficult to operationalize. Moreover, complexity increases the danger of ‘over‐fitting’, which leads to poor performance when models are applied to novel conditions. This challenge is typically described in terms of a trade‐off between bias and variance (i.e. low accuracy vs. low precision). In studies of ecological communities, this trade‐off often leads to an argument about the level of detail needed to describe interactions among species. Here, we used data from a grassland biodiversity experiment containing nine locally abundant plant species (the Jena ‘dominance experiment’) to parameterize models representing six increasingly complex hypotheses about interactions. For each model, we calculated goodness‐of‐fit across different subsets of the data based on sown species richness levels, and tested how performance changed depending on whether or not the same data were used to parameterize and test the model (i.e. within vs. out‐of‐sample), and whether the range of diversity treatments being predicted fell inside or outside of the range used for parameterization. As expected, goodness‐of‐fit improved as a function of model complexity for all within‐sample tests. In contrast, the best out‐of‐sample performance generally resulted from models of intermediate complexity (i.e. with only two interaction coefficients per species—an intraspecific effect and a single pooled interspecific effect), especially for predictions that fell outside the range of diversity treatments used for parameterization. In accordance with other studies, our results also demonstrate that commonly used selection methods based on AIC of models fitted to the full dataset correspond more closely to within‐sample than out‐of‐sample performance. Synthesis. Our results demonstrate that models which include only general intra and interspecific interaction coefficients can be sufficient for estimating species‐level abundances across a wide range of contexts and may provide better out‐of‐sample performance than do more complex models. These findings serve as a reminder that simpler models may often provide a better trade‐off between bias and variance in ecological systems, particularly when applying models beyond the conditions used to parameterize them.

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Signs of stabilisation and stable coexistence

Cited by 59 publications

References 101 publications

Species abundance fluctuations over 31 years are associated with plant–soil feedback in a species‐rich mountain meadow

Species abundance fluctuations over 31 years are associated with plant–soil feedback in a species‐rich mountain meadow

Stage-mediated priority effects and season lengths shape long-term competition dynamics

Predicting species abundances in a grassland biodiversity experiment: Trade‐offs between model complexity and generality

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