ORCID Profile
0000-0003-4988-6626
Current Organisation
University of Cádiz
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Population Ecology | Ecology | Community Ecology | Invasive Species Ecology |
Ecosystem Adaptation to Climate Change | Expanding Knowledge in the Biological Sciences | Forest and Woodlands Flora, Fauna and Biodiversity
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 30-11-2021
DOI: 10.1101/2021.11.29.470335
Abstract: Theory posits that the persistence of species in ecological communities is shaped by their interactions within and across trophic guilds. However, we lack empirical evaluations of how the structure, strength, and sign of biotic interactions drive the potential to coexist in erse multi-trophic communities. Here we model community feasibility domains, a theoretically-informed measure of multi-species coexistence probability, from grassland communities comprising more than 45 species on average from three trophic guilds (plants, pollinators, and herbivores). Contrary to our hypothesis, increasing community complexity, measured either as the number of guilds or community richness, did not decrease community feasibility. Rather, we observed that high degrees of species self-regulation and niche partitioning allow maintaining larger levels of community feasibility and higher species persistence in more erse communities. Our results show that biotic interactions within and across guilds are not random in nature and both structures significantly contribute to maintaining multi-trophic ersity.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 05-07-2022
DOI: 10.1002/EAP.2649
Abstract: Restoration ecology commonly seeks to re‐establish species of interest in degraded habitats. Despite a rich understanding of how succession influences re‐establishment, there are several outstanding questions that remain unaddressed: are short‐term abundances sufficient to determine long‐term re‐establishment success, and what factors contribute to unpredictable restorations outcomes? In other words, when restoration fails, is it because the restored habitat is substandard, because of strong competition with invasive species, or alternatively due to changing environmental conditions that would equally impact established populations? Here, we re‐purpose tools developed from modern coexistence theory to address these questions, and apply them to an effort to restore the endangered Contra Costa goldfields ( Lasthenia conjugens ) in constructed (“restored”) California vernal pools. Using 16 years of data, we construct a population model of L. conjugens , a species of conservation concern due primarily to habitat loss and invasion of exotic grasses. We show that initial, short‐term appearances of restoration success from population abundances is misleading, as year‐to‐year fluctuations cause long‐term population growth rates to fall below zero. The failure of constructed pools is driven by lower maximum growth rates compared with reference (“natural”) pools, coupled with a stronger negative sensitivity to annual fluctuations in abiotic conditions that yield decreased maximum growth rates. Nonetheless, our modeling shows that fluctuations in competition (mainly with exotic grasses) benefit L. conjugens through periods of competitive release, especially in constructed pools of intermediate pool depth. We therefore show how reductions in invasives and seed addition in pools of particular depths could change the outcome of restoration for L. conjugens . By applying a largely theoretical framework to the urgent goal of ecological restoration, our study provides a blueprint for predicting restoration success, and identifies future actions to reverse species loss.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 27-03-2023
DOI: 10.1111/ELE.14206
Abstract: Theory posits that the persistence of species in ecological communities is shaped by their interactions within and across trophic guilds. However, we lack empirical evaluations of how the structure, strength and sign of biotic interactions drive the potential to coexist in erse multi‐trophic communities. Here, we model community feasibility domains, a theoretically informed measure of multi‐species coexistence probability, from grassland communities comprising more than 45 species on average from three trophic guilds (plants, pollinators and herbivores). Contrary to our hypothesis, increasing community complexity, measured either as the number of guilds or community richness, did not decrease community feasibility. Rather, we observed that high degrees of species self‐regulation and niche partitioning allow for maintaining larger levels of community feasibility and higher species persistence in more erse communities. Our results show that biotic interactions within and across guilds are not random in nature and both structures significantly contribute to maintaining multi‐trophic ersity.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 09-2008
DOI: 10.1111/J.1461-0248.2008.01219.X
Abstract: Worldwide decomposition rates depend both on climate and the legacy of plant functional traits as litter quality. To quantify the degree to which functional differentiation among species affects their litter decomposition rates, we brought together leaf trait and litter mass loss data for 818 species from 66 decomposition experiments on six continents. We show that: (i) the magnitude of species-driven differences is much larger than previously thought and greater than climate-driven variation (ii) the decomposability of a species' litter is consistently correlated with that species' ecological strategy within different ecosystems globally, representing a new connection between whole plant carbon strategy and biogeochemical cycling. This connection between plant strategies and decomposability is crucial for both understanding vegetation-soil feedbacks, and for improving forecasts of the global carbon cycle.
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 19-11-2021
DOI: 10.1101/2021.11.18.469079
Abstract: There is growing recognition that interactions between species pairs are modified in a multispecies context by the density of a third species. However, how these higher-order interactions (HOIs) affect species persistence remains poorly understood. To explore the effect of HOIs steaming from multiple trophic layers on plant persistence, we experimentally built a mutualistic system containing three plants and three pollinators species with two contrasting network structures. For both structures, we first estimated the statistically supported HOIs on plant species, in addition to the pairwise interactions among plants and plant-pollinators. Following a structuralist approach, we then assessed the effects of the supported HOIs on the persistence probability of each of the three competing plant species and their combinations. HOIs produced substantial effects on the strength and sign of per capita interactions between plant species to such an extent that predictions of species persistence differ from a non-HOIs scenario. Changes in network structure due to removing a plant-pollinator link further modulated the species persistence probabilities by reorganizing per capita interaction strengths of both pairwise interactions and HOIs. Our study provides empirical evidence of the joint importance of HOIs and network structure for determining the probability of species to persist within erse communities.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 27-09-2023
DOI: 10.1002/ECY.3838
Abstract: Contemporary studies of species coexistence are underpinned by deterministic models that assume that competing species have continuous (i.e., noninteger) densities, live in infinitely large landscapes, and coexist over infinite time horizons. By contrast, in nature, species are composed of discrete in iduals subject to demographic stochasticity and occur in habitats of finite size where extinctions occur in finite time. One consequence of these discrepancies is that metrics of species’ coexistence derived from deterministic theory may be unreliable predictors of the duration of species coexistence in nature. These coexistence metrics include invasion growth rates and niche and fitness differences, which are now commonly applied in theoretical and empirical studies of species coexistence. In this study, we tested the efficacy of deterministic coexistence metrics on the duration of species coexistence in a finite world. We introduce new theoretical and computational methods to estimate coexistence times in stochastic counterparts of classic deterministic models of competition. Importantly, we parameterized this model using experimental field data for 90 pairwise combinations of 18 species of annual plants, allowing us to derive biologically informed estimates of coexistence times for a natural system. Strikingly, we found that for species expected to deterministically coexist, community sizes containing only 10 in iduals had predicted coexistence times of more than 1000 years. We also found that invasion growth rates explained 60% of the variation in intrinsic coexistence times, reinforcing their general usefulness in studies of coexistence. However, only by integrating information on both invasion growth rates and species' equilibrium population sizes could most ( %) of the variation in species coexistence times be explained. This integration was achieved with demographically uncoupled single‐species models solely determined by the invasion growth rates and equilibrium population sizes. Moreover, because of a complex relationship between niche overlap/fitness differences and equilibrium population sizes, increasing niche overlap and increasing fitness differences did not always result in decreasing coexistence times, as deterministic theory would predict. Nevertheless, our results tend to support the informed use of deterministic theory for understanding the duration of species’ coexistence while highlighting the need to incorporate information on species' equilibrium population sizes in addition to invasion growth rates.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 11-04-2019
DOI: 10.1111/BRV.12511
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 26-07-2021
DOI: 10.1101/2021.07.23.453227
Abstract: 1 Modeling species interactions in erse communities traditionally requires a prohibitively large number of species-interaction coefficients, especially when considering environmental dependence of parameters. We implemented Bayesian variable selection via sparsity-inducing priors on non-linear species abundance models to determine which species-interactions should be retained and which can be represented as an average heterospecific interaction term, reducing the number of model parameters. We evaluated model performance using simulated communities, computing out-of-s le predictive accuracy and parameter recovery across different input s le sizes. We applied our method to a erse empirical community, allowing us to disentangle the direct role of environmental gradients on species’ intrinsic growth rates from indirect effects via competitive interactions. We also identified a few neighboring species from the erse community that had non-generic interactions with our focal species. This sparse modeling approach facilitates exploration of species-interactions in erse communities while maintaining a manageable number of parameters.
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 28-03-2018
DOI: 10.1101/290882
Abstract: Contemporary studies of species coexistence are underpinned by deterministic models that assume that competing species have continuous (i.e. non-integer) densities, live in infinitely large landscapes, and coexist over infinite time horizons. By contrast, in nature species are composed of discrete in iduals subject to demographic stochasticity, and occur in habitats of finite size where extinctions occur in finite time. One consequence of these discrepancies is that metrics of species coexistence derived from deterministic theory may be unreliable predictors of the duration of species coexistence in nature. These coexistence metrics include invasion growth rates and niche and fitness differences, which are now commonly applied in theoretical and empirical studies of species coexistence. Here we test the efficacy of deterministic coexistence metrics on the duration of species coexistence in a finite world. We introduce new theoretical and computational methods to estimate coexistence times in stochastic counterparts of classic deterministic models of competition. Importantly, we parameterized this model using experimental field data for 90 pairwise combinations of 18 species of annual plants, allowing us to derive biologically-informed estimates of coexistence times for a natural system. Strikingly, we find that for species expected to deterministically coexist, habitat sizes containing only tens of in iduals have predicted coexistence times of greater than 1, 000 years. We also find that invasion growth rates explain 60% of the variation in intrinsic coexistence times, reinforcing their general usefulness in studies of coexistence. However, only by integrating information on both invasion growth rates and species’ equilibrium population sizes could most ( 99%) of the variation in species coexistence times be explained. This integration is achieved with demographically uncoupled single species models solely determined by the invasion growth rates and equilibrium population sizes. Moreover, because of a complex relationship between niche overlap/fitness differences and equilibrium population sizes, increasing niche overlap and increasing fitness differences did not always result in decreasing coexistence times as deterministic theory would predict. Nevertheless, our results tend to support the informed use of deterministic theory for understanding the duration of species coexistence, while highlighting the need to incorporate information on species’ equilibrium population sizes in addition to invasion growth rates.
Location: No location found
Location: United States of America
Start Date: 06-2021
End Date: 06-2024
Amount: $470,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
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