The evolution of niche overlap and competitive differences

Pastore, Abigail I.; Barabás, György; Bimler, Malyon D.; Mayfield, Margaret M.; Miller, Thomas E.

doi:10.1038/s41559-020-01383-y

Cited by 95 publications

(78 citation statements)

References 67 publications

(84 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…We hypothesized that coexisting species have co-evolved to maximize their niche di erence. This hypothesis is aligned with classical thinking (Macarthur and Levins, 1967;Slatkin, 1980;Stomp et al, 2004) and recent work (Zhao et al, 2016), but also challenges recent findings, suggesting the predominant interaction of evolution with fitness di erences rather than niche di erences (Hart et al, 2019;Germain et al, 2020;Pastore et al, 2021) Hence, the role of evolution in driving ecological outcomes needs to be evaluated in further detail.…”

Section: Limitations and Perspectivessupporting

confidence: 80%

Niche differences, not fitness differences, explain coexistence across ecological groups

Buche

Spaak

Jarillo

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Understanding how species interactions affect community composition is an important objective in ecology. Yet, the multitude of methods to study coexistence has hampered cross-community comparisons. Here, we standardized niche and fitness differences across 1018 species pairs to compare the processes driving composition and outcomes, among four community types (annual plant, perennial plant, phytoplankton, and bacteria/yeast). First, we show that niche differences are more important drivers of coexistence than fitness differences. Second, in all community types negative frequency dependence is the most frequent process. Finally, the outcome of species interactions differs among community types. Coexistence was the most frequent outcome for perennial plants and phytoplankton, while competitive exclusion was the most prevalent outcome in annual plants and bacteria/yeasts. Overall, our results show that niche and fitness differences can be used as a common currency that allow cross community comparisons to understand species coexistence.

show abstract

Section: Limitations and Perspectivessupporting

confidence: 80%

Niche differences, not fitness differences, explain coexistence across ecological groups

Buche

Spaak

Jarillo

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For consumers, metabolic loss and mortality always result in negative intrinsic growth, which must be compensated by sufficient consumption to maintain their populations. Third, there is a local competition between resource species, which can be thought of as exploitative competition for a set of shared substitutable lower-level resources 26 . Consumers, when present, compete only indirectly via their shared resource species.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The importance of species interactions in eco-evolutionary community dynamics under climate change

et al. 2021

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Eco-evolutionary dynamics are essential in shaping the biological response of communities to ongoing climate change. Here we develop a spatially explicit eco-evolutionary framework which features more detailed species interactions, integrating evolution and dispersal. We include species interactions within and between trophic levels, and additionally, we incorporate the feature that species’ interspecific competition might change due to increasing temperatures and affect the impact of climate change on ecological communities. Our modeling framework captures previously reported ecological responses to climate change, and also reveals two key results. First, interactions between trophic levels as well as temperature-dependent competition within a trophic level mitigate the negative impact of climate change on biodiversity, emphasizing the importance of understanding biotic interactions in shaping climate change impact. Second, our trait-based perspective reveals a strong positive relationship between the within-community variation in preferred temperatures and the capacity to respond to climate change. Temperature-dependent competition consistently results both in higher trait variation and more responsive communities to altered climatic conditions. Our study demonstrates the importance of species interactions in an eco-evolutionary setting, further expanding our knowledge of the interplay between ecological and evolutionary processes.

show abstract

“…Modern coexistence theory (MCT) holds the potential to identify similarities and differences among community types in how species persist, that is, avoid local extinction in the long term (Chesson 2000, Adler et al 2007, Narwani et al 2013. MCT has been used to study a variety of problems dealing with, for instance, eco-evolutionary dynamics (Hart et al 2019, Pastore et al 2021, global change effects and macroecological dynamics (Grainger et al 2019a). The main objective of MCT is to study species coexistence (see Glossary) or more generally the persistence of single species.…”

Section: From Listing Species Interactions To Mapping Speciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping species niche and fitness differences for communities with multiple interaction types

Spaak

Godoy

Laender

2021

Oikos

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We propose the niche and fitness differences map, a tool that simplifies the comparison of results across modern coexistence theory. Importantly, it allows to compare communities with very different underlying structure, such as competitive, mutualistic, multi-species or even multi-trophic communities. This generality will help us to unify formerly distant research areas into one combined framework, the N-F map. The N-F map consists of nine different regions that give insight into the underlying mechanism affecting each species. This gives us a visual tool to quickly and easily compare different species from different communities. SynthesisModern coexistence theory (MCT) holds the potential to study the ability of species to avoid extinction (i.e. to persist) across community types but is rarely applied beyond pairs of competing species. Here, we show that this limitation can be overcome by mapping species according to their niche (  i ) and fitness differences (  i ). This application provides three main benefits to study processes of multispecies persistence across trophic levels. First, N F mapping introduces a novel categorization of species and communities according to the high-level processes at play: frequency dependence (negative or positive), the occurrence of positive species interactions (facilitation and mutualism) and whether persistence is possible without the presence of other species because of trophic interactions, such as herbivory or predation. Therefore, this mapping can be seen as a toolbox to describe how species persistence depends on species interactions. Second, N F mapping facilitates studying how species persistence responds to environmental changes that shift intrinsic growth rates and the strength and sign of species interactions. Third, N F mapping has the potential to foster synthesis across community types because it can accommodate co-occurrence of positive, negative and neutral interactions between species. We, therefore, argue that N F mapping can promote collaboration across sub-fields, as it provides a common concept to link disparate ecological communities.

show abstract

The evolution of niche overlap and competitive differences

Cited by 95 publications

References 67 publications

Niche differences, not fitness differences, explain coexistence across ecological groups

Niche differences, not fitness differences, explain coexistence across ecological groups

The importance of species interactions in eco-evolutionary community dynamics under climate change

Mapping species niche and fitness differences for communities with multiple interaction types

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About