Testing the competition–colonization trade‐off with a 32‐year study of a saxicolous lichen community

Pastore, Abigail I.; Prather, Chelse M.; Gornish, Elise S.; Ryan, Will H.; Miller, Thomas E.

doi:10.1890/13-0253.1

Cited by 13 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…In this study, we revealed that the CD trade‐off depends on plant traits that are closely related to competitive or dispersal ability. Indeed, previous studies have suggested that relationships among species’ traits related to species’ competitive and dispersal ability play an important role in determining the absence or presence of a CD trade‐off (Pastore et al, ; Suding, Goldberg, & Hartman, ). Moreover, the CD trade‐off could be highly likely under the conditions of resource constraints, which result in negative correlations between plant traits (Limberger & Wickham, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The competition–dispersal trade‐off exists in forbs but not in graminoids: A case study from multispecies alpine grassland communities

Zhou

et al. 2019

Ecology and Evolution

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Much theoretical evidence has demonstrated that a trade‐off between competitive and dispersal ability plays an important role in facilitating species coexistence. However, experimental evidence from natural communities is still rare. Here, we tested the competition–dispersal trade‐off hypothesis in an alpine grassland in the Tianshan Mountains, Xinjiang, China, by quantifying competitive and dispersal ability using a combination of 4 plant traits (seed mass, ramet mass, height, and dispersal mode). Our results show that the competition–dispersal trade‐off exists in the alpine grassland community and that this pattern was primarily demonstrated by forbs. The results suggest that most forb species are constrained to be either good competitors or good dispersers but not both, while there was no significant trade‐off between competitive and dispersal ability for most graminoids. This might occur because graminoids undergo clonal reproduction, which allows them to find more benign microenvironments, forage for nutrients across a large area and store resources in clonal structures, and they are thus not strictly limited by the particular resources at our study site. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the CD trade‐off has been tested for plants across the whole life cycle in a natural multispecies plant community, and more comprehensive studies are still needed to explore the underlying mechanisms and the linkage between the CD trade‐off and community composition.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The competition–dispersal trade‐off exists in forbs but not in graminoids: A case study from multispecies alpine grassland communities

Zhou

et al. 2019

Ecology and Evolution

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“…Some dismiss the presence of the trade‐off (Pastore et al . ), while others conclude that it cannot fully explain coexistence (Yu et al . ), citing other mechanisms as more important, such as the storage effect where temporal variability in species settlement allows coexistence (Warner & Chesson ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Other studies are less conclusive. Some dismiss the presence of the trade-off (Pastore et al 2014), while others conclude that it cannot fully explain coexistence (Yu et al 2004), citing other mechanisms as more important, such as the storage effect where temporal variability in species settlement allows coexistence (Warner & Chesson 1985). The presence of the trade-off may depend on certain ecological scenarios (Connolly & Muko 2003), community size (Orrock & Watling 2010), and the species involved (Kadowaki et al 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Latitudinal variation in the competition‐colonisation trade‐off reveals rate‐mediated mechanisms of coexistence

2017

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Theories of species coexistence often describe a trade-off between colonising and competitive abilities. In sessile marine invertebrates, this trade-off can manifest as trends in species distributions relative to the size of isolated patches of substrate. Based on their abilities to find available substrate and competitively exclude neighbours, good colonisers tend to dominate smaller patches, whereas better competitors tend to monopolise larger patches. In theory, species with equivalent colonising and competitive abilities should display similar distributions across patch sizes. We used patch size to observe this manifestation of the competition-colonisation trade-off over 20° of latitude. The trade-off was more readily observed at lower latitudes and was proportional to the 'ecological age' of communities (i.e. the degree of resource acquisition and likelihood of species interactions). Results suggest that ecological age may mediate the prominence of stochastic or deterministic coexistence mechanisms and will depend on the rate of ecological processes.

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“…Corresponding differences in colonizing and competitive ability represented by plant functional traits are expected from early to late succession, due to the shift in dominator from colonist to competitor, but have not been linked directly to species abundance (Zhang et al., 2015). Moreover, the shift in plant strategies from colonization to competition has since been originated from models that allow the degree of competitive asymmetry and preemption in a community to occur on a continuum (Calcagno, Mouquet, Jarne, & David, 2006; Figueiredo & Connolly, 2012) and the responding empirical evidence for linkage between species abundance and such a shift remains extremely sparse, especially in natural ecosystems (Pastore et al., 2014). The observed directional shifts in the relationships between colonization/competition‐related traits (photosynthesis rate, leaf proline content, seed mass, and seed germination rate) and species abundance with successional age provided strong empirical evidence for the influence of the shift in plant strategies from colonization to competition on species abundance along a naturally developed subalpine meadow succession.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Functional traits associated with plant colonizing and competitive ability influence species abundance during secondary succession: Evidence from subalpine meadows of the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau

Zhang

Liu

2018

Ecology and Evolution

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It is widely recognized that colonists and competitors dominate early and late succession, respectively, with selected species having different colonizing and competitive abilities. However, it remains unknown whether colonizing and competitive ability can determine species abundance directly over succession. The data for five key functional traits were collected (photosynthesis rate, leaf turgor loss point, leaf proline content, seed mass, and seed germination rate), which are direct indicators of plant competitive and colonizing abilities including growth, drought and cold stress resistance, dispersal, and seed dormancy. Here, we tested the effects of colonizing and competitive abilities on species abundance, by employing a linear mixed‐effects model to examine the shifts in the relationship between species abundance and these five colonization and competition‐related traits in species‐rich subalpine secondary successional meadows (at 4, 6, 10, 13 years of age, and undisturbed, respectively) of the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau. The abundant species at the early‐successional meadows tend to have high photosynthetic rate, high leaf proline content, low seed mass, and seed germination rate for having high colonizing ability, but low competitive ability. By contrast, late‐successional communities tend to be dominated by species with high competitive ability, but low colonizing ability, indicated by large seeds, high seed germination rate, low photosynthetic rate, and leaf proline content. The observed directional shifts in the relationships between traits (photosynthetic rate, leaf proline content, seed mass, and seed germination rate) and abundance with successional age, bring two new understandings of community assembly during succession of subalpine meadows in the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau. First, it discloses that the differences in species abundance over succession can be directly attributed to differences in colonizing and competitive abilities of different species. Second, it expands the effects of multiple life historical differences including growth, resource competitive ability, cold stress resistance, dispersal, and seed germination strategy, represented by functional traits on community assembly along succession, that is, from the species to the community level.

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Testing the competition–colonization trade‐off with a 32‐year study of a saxicolous lichen community

Cited by 13 publications

References 48 publications

The competition–dispersal trade‐off exists in forbs but not in graminoids: A case study from multispecies alpine grassland communities

The competition–dispersal trade‐off exists in forbs but not in graminoids: A case study from multispecies alpine grassland communities

Latitudinal variation in the competition‐colonisation trade‐off reveals rate‐mediated mechanisms of coexistence

Functional traits associated with plant colonizing and competitive ability influence species abundance during secondary succession: Evidence from subalpine meadows of the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau

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