Unveiling ecological assembly rules from commonalities in trait distributions

Gross, Nicolas; Le Bagousse‐Pinguet, Yoann; Liancourt, Pierre; Saiz, Hugo; Violle, Cyrille; Munoz, François (2021). Unveiling ecological assembly rules from commonalities in trait distributions. Ecology Letters, 24(8), pp. 1668-1680. Wiley-Blackwell Publishing 10.1111/ele.13789

Text 2021_EcolLett_24_1668.pdf - Published Version Restricted to registered users only Available under License Publisher holds Copyright. Download (1MB)

Deciphering the effect of neutral and deterministic processes on community assembly is critical to understand and predict diversity patterns. The information held in community trait distributions is commonly assumed as a signature of these processes, but empirical and modelling attempts have most often failed to untangle their confounding, sometimes opposing, impacts. Here, we simulated the assembly of trait distributions through stochastic (dispersal limitation) and/or deterministic scenarios (environmental filtering and niche differentiation). We characterized the shape of trait distributions using the skewness–kurtosis relationship. We identified commonalities in the co-variation between the skewness and the kurtosis of trait distributions with a unique signature for each simulated assembly scenario. Our findings were robust to variation in the composition of regional species pools, dispersal limitation and environmental conditions. While ecological communities can exhibit a high degree of idiosyncrasy, identification of commonalities across multiple communities can help to unveil ecological assembly rules in real-world ecosystems.

Interest & Impact

Downloads

3 since deposited on 15 Jul 2021
0 in the past 12 months

Citations

5 Citations in Web of Science ®
6 Citations in Scopus

Search

in Google Scholar™

Services

Actions (login required)

Edit item

Actions (login required)

Edit item