ON THE INTEGRATION OF BIOTIC INTERACTION AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONSTRAINTS AT THE BIOGEOGRAPHICAL SCALE.

Cazelle, K., Mouquet N., Mouillot, D. and Gravel, D. (2016).

Ecography, 38, 001-011, doi:10.1111/ecog.01714

Key message : Here we build upon the theory of island biogeography as a first approximation to the assembly dynamics of local communities embedded within a metacommunity context. We include all types of interactions and introduce environmental constraints on colonization and extinction dynamics. We develop a probabilistic framework based on Markov chains and derive probabilities for the realization of species assemblages, rather than single species occurrences. We consider the expected distribution of species richness under different types of ecological interactions. We also illustrate the potential of our framework by studying the interplay between different ecological requirements, interactions and the distribution of biodiversity along an environmental gradient. Our framework supports the idea that the future research in biogeography requires a coherent integration of several ecological concepts into a single theory in order to perform conceptual and methodological innovations, such as the switch from single-species distribution to community distribution.

Effects of biotic interactions on colonization extinction dynamics. For any species i, the extinction probability ei is related to the strength of the interaction as shown in (A). The intersections of extinction curves with the grey dotted lines indicate the potential values of ei according to the different biotic context (A1, A2 and without interaction). We simulated the model for two simple networks A1 and A2 and present community assembly dynamics associated ((B) and (C)). Finally we compare the expected species richness on the locality (D) for our two networks and for the case without interaction.

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OTHER TOPICS: Aesthetics of Biodiversity, Biogeography, Macroecology & Ecophylogenetics, Experimental Evolution, Functional Biogeography, Functional Rarity, Nature for Future, Metacommunities, Metaecosystems, Reviews and Synthesis, Trophic Biogeography & Metaweb