Posted by Maren Wellenreuther
Next week, we will discuss a paper by Adam Siepielski and Mark McPeek on the evidence for species coexistence. The paper was published in 2010 as part of the Concepts & Synthesis section in Ecology, which aims towards stimulating new research in ecology. In a nutshell, the authors survey the literature for empirical studies of coexistence on a local scale and evaluate how many of these studies also actually test the underlying assumptions of species coexistence (such as invasibility).
In addition, I would like to ask everybody to bring either your favorite biology book or a biology/science book that you think might be of interest to somebody else in the EXEB group. The idea is that we can get inspirations and ideas from each other, and maybe some healthy book swapping will result from it.
Time and place as usual: Argumentet (2nd floor, Ecology Building) at 10.30
I will bring fika!
Below is the abstract of the paper that we will discuss.
Siepielski, Adam M., and Mark A. McPeek. 2010. On the evidence for
species coexistence: a critique of the coexistence program. Ecology
91:3153–3164.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/10-0154.1
Abstract
A major challenge in ecology is to understand how the millions
of species on Earth are organized into biological communities.
Mechanisms promoting coexistence are one such class of organizing
processes, which allow multiple species to persist in the same trophic
level of a given web of species interactions. If some mechanism promotes
the coexistence of two or more species, each species must be able to
increase when it is rare and the others are at their typical abundances;
this invasibility criterion is fundamental evidence for species
coexistence regardless of the mechanism. In an attempt to evaluate the
level of empirical support for coexistence mechanisms in nature, we
surveyed the literature for empirical studies of coexistence at a local
scale (i.e., species found living together in one place) to determine
whether these studies satisfied the invasibility criterion. In our
survey, only seven of 323 studies that drew conclusions about species
coexistence evaluated invasibility in some way in either observational
or experimental studies. In addition, only three other studies evaluated
necessary but not sufficient conditions for invasibility (i.e.,
negative density dependence and a trade-off in performance that
influences population regulation). These results indicate that, while
species coexistence is a prevalent assumption for why species are able
to live together in one place, critical empirical tests of this
fundamental assumption of community structure are rarely performed.
These tests are central to developing a more robust understanding of the
relative contributions of both deterministic and stochastic processes
structuring biological communities
Get the paper and read more: http://www.esajournals.org/doi/full/10.1890/10-0154.1
Get the paper and read more: http://www.esajournals.org/doi/full/10.1890/10-0154.1
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