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Author: Louis Donelle Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 75
Book Description
Spatial environmental heterogeneity is widely accepted and cited as a mechanism underlying the structure of ecological communities. Most empirical evidence related to the effects of environmental heterogeneity comes from assessing how local environments vary in relation to one another and how this variation affects community (and metacommunity) structure. However, similar levels of environmental variation are often structured differently in space, likely affecting species distributions and the ways in which they coexist. Yet, the spatial structure of environmental variation received very little attention. In this study, we set out for the first time a model to understand the effects of the spatial structure of the environment on metacommunity dynamics and its effects on species co-existence at local and regional levels. We built a metacommunity model in a spatially explicit landscape with spatially structured environmental conditions and a continuum of specialist to generalist species that competed for space. Dispersal mortality was set as a function of species' environmental tolerances and the environmental variation experienced during dispersal. The spatial structure of the environment was found to increase local and regional coexistence, while also selecting for more specialist species. In landscapes with strong spatial structure, patches with similar environmental values were clustered together, thus facilitating the successful colonization of suitable patches by specialist species. Conversely, weakly structured landscapes selected for generalist species. As such, increased environmental spatialization fostered niche partitioning, facilitating coexistence and, as a result, increasing local and regional diversity.
Author: Louis Donelle Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 75
Book Description
Spatial environmental heterogeneity is widely accepted and cited as a mechanism underlying the structure of ecological communities. Most empirical evidence related to the effects of environmental heterogeneity comes from assessing how local environments vary in relation to one another and how this variation affects community (and metacommunity) structure. However, similar levels of environmental variation are often structured differently in space, likely affecting species distributions and the ways in which they coexist. Yet, the spatial structure of environmental variation received very little attention. In this study, we set out for the first time a model to understand the effects of the spatial structure of the environment on metacommunity dynamics and its effects on species co-existence at local and regional levels. We built a metacommunity model in a spatially explicit landscape with spatially structured environmental conditions and a continuum of specialist to generalist species that competed for space. Dispersal mortality was set as a function of species' environmental tolerances and the environmental variation experienced during dispersal. The spatial structure of the environment was found to increase local and regional coexistence, while also selecting for more specialist species. In landscapes with strong spatial structure, patches with similar environmental values were clustered together, thus facilitating the successful colonization of suitable patches by specialist species. Conversely, weakly structured landscapes selected for generalist species. As such, increased environmental spatialization fostered niche partitioning, facilitating coexistence and, as a result, increasing local and regional diversity.
Author: Marcel Holyoak Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226350649 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 527
Book Description
Takes the hallmarks of metapopulation theory to the next level by considering a group of communities, each of which may contain numerous populations, connected by species interactions within communities and the movement of individuals between communities. This book seeks to understand how communities work in fragmented landscapes.
Author: Robert Fletcher Publisher: Springer ISBN: 3030019896 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 531
Book Description
This book provides a foundation for modern applied ecology. Much of current ecology research and conservation addresses problems across landscapes and regions, focusing on spatial patterns and processes. This book is aimed at teaching fundamental concepts and focuses on learning-by-doing through the use of examples with the software R. It is intended to provide an entry-level, easily accessible foundation for students and practitioners interested in spatial ecology and conservation.
Author: Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
One of the major goals of ecology is to understand the mechanisms which promote species coexistence. Much progress has been made in recent years in understanding how spatial processes influence diversity. Here we present a pair of models designed to investigate the role of one spatial process, localized dispersal, in promoting regional species coexistence when trophic structure is present. The model community considered is a two-predator, two-prey assemblage with cyclic endstates. Through analysis and simulation, we show that increasing the range of species dispersal can inhibit regional species coexistence. This result is at odds with the conclusions of some previous studies which considered locality within a single trophic level, and suggests that the relationship between dispersal distance and regional coexistence may be more complicated than previously realized.
Author: Allison K. Barner Publisher: ISBN: Category : Bioclimatology Languages : en Pages : 268
Book Description
Ecologists must increasingly balance the need for accurate predictions about how ecosystems will be affected by climate change, against the fact that making such predictions at the ecosystem-level may be infeasible. Although information about responses of individual species to a changing environment is increasing, scaling such information to the community level is challenging. To date, predicting responses of ecological communities to climate change is constrained by limited theoretical and empirical knowledge about the response of communities and ecosystems to change. My dissertation addresses several knowledge gaps in our understanding of community structure under climate change. This research draws from a rich experimental tradition in the species-diverse model ecosystem of the US Pacific Northwest rocky intertidal to test ecological theory. In Chapter 2, I assessed whether the response of multiple species of coralline algae to global change could be predicted from basic first principles of chemistry, physiology, and ecology. Given the rate of global change, and the time-consuming process of experimentally determining species responses to climate change, I hypothesized that species can be grouped using existing theory, either by their evolutionary relatedness or by their ecological traits, such that climate responses are similar within a group. Such a scheme would greatly reduce the number of experiments needed to characterize species climate vulnerability, requiring the characterization of the response of groups of species to climate change, rather than individual species. Using a suite of five co-occurring species of intertidal articulated coralline algae (Corallina vancouveriensis, Corallina officinalis, Bossiella plumosa, Bossiella orbiginiana, and Calliarthron tuberculosum), I applied this framework to generate ten mutually exclusive hypotheses that could explain organismal response to ocean acidification, a consequence of global climate change that threatens marine calcifying species. I found that all species had similar responses to ocean acidification, and that responses were generally predicted by the body size of the individual. Despite the power that such a framework provides in understanding group-level response to climate change, predicting community-level response requires knowledge of how organisms affect one another. In Chapter 3, I quantified species interactions in a series of removal experiments to estimate the reciprocal effects between a canopy-forming intertidal kelp (Saccharina sessilis) and a suite of understory species that persist beneath the kelp canopy. This experiment was replicated in different oceanographic conditions across a large latitudinal gradient, as a step towards understanding how interactions might change with climate change. However, the experiment demonstrated that interactions between the canopy and understory were consistent among different environmental conditions. Furthermore, the strongest effect was that of understory species, particularly articulated coralline turf algae, on the canopy species. The coralline turf algae both facilitated the recruitment of the canopy species and buffered the canopy from abiotic stress during its adult life stage. Combining experimental results and observational surveys, a hypothesized interaction network for these species was constructed, highlighting the importance of direct and indirect species interactions in promoting species coexistence. A long-standing controversy in ecology is whether or not species interactions can be inferred from observational data, as opposed to from experimental tests. Although the rocky intertidal ecosystem is unique for its ease of experimental manipulation, quantifying species interactions experimentally is often difficult or impossible. As an alternative, many have turned to statistical methods to estimate species interactions from observational data, namely, from patterns in species pairwise co-occurrences. In Chapter 4, I examined these co-occurrence methods and their potential relationship to experimentally measured species interactions. I first used a suite of different co-occurrence methods to generate a set of predicted species interactions of macrophytes and invertebrates from observational surveys conducted in the rocky intertidal zone of Oregon. I then compared the predicted species interactions to the same pairwise species interactions determined experimentally and assembled from the literature. Overall, of the seven methods tested, each generated a different set of predicted species interactions from the same data, and all methods predicted interactions that did not match those in the experimental database. Thus, predicting species interactions from patterns in occurrence remains elusive. Importantly, much work remains to be done to understand the link between species co-occurrences and their actual interactions with one another on the landscape. A key limiting frontier in climate change ecology is determining the influence of species interactions on species distributions across the landscape, and the sensitivity of such interactions to changes in climate. Finally, in Chapter 5, I used theory from the published literature and knowledge from my previous chapters to make predictions the recovery of low rocky intertidal communities after a disturbance. The process of community development after disturbance has been studied in many ways, from the successional studies of the early 1900s, to modern community assembly theory. In recent years, a focus on the unpredictability of community assembly has emerged, paying particular attention to the role of historical contingency, or priority effects, in determining the recovery trajectory of a community. Priority effects occur when the arrival of a species after a disturbance inalterably changes the composition of the developing community, driving the assembly of widely different communities at a small spatial scale. I conducted a community assembly experiment in three different low intertidal zone community "types", each characterized by different dominant macrophyte species (Saccharina sessilis, Phyllospadix spp., and algal "turfs"). Replicating this experiment at six sites along the Oregon coast, I found that both regional and local dynamics constrain the recovery of communities after disturbance. Half of the time, the community returned to the state of the nearby community type. The remaining communities were influenced by priority effects that could be predicted based on 1) regional dynamics favoring some species over others, or 2) the timing of arrival of important facilitating species. Overall, understanding the dynamic relationship between the persistence of diverse communities and a changing environment remains one of the challenges of our time. My dissertation highlights some of the challenges in predicting the future composition of communities under climate change, but also provides some ways forward. Integration of experimental, theoretical, and observational studies builds the scaffolding of prediction, whereby understanding the constraints on species physiology, the interactions among species, and community assembly can help frame the context in which predictions are made.
Author: David Tilman Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691209650 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 310
Book Description
One of the central questions of ecology is why there are so many different kinds of plants and animals. Here David Tilman presents a theory of how organisms compete for resources and the way their competition promotes diversity. Developing Hutchinson's suggestion that the main cause of diversity is the feeding relations of species, this book builds a mechanistic, resource-based explanation of the structure and functioning of ecological communities. In a detailed analysis of the Park Grass Experiments at the Rothamsted Experimental Station in England, the author demonstrates that the dramatic results of these 120 years of experimentation are consistent with his theory, as are observations in many other natural communities. The consumer-resource approach of this book is applicable to both animal and plant communities, but the majority of Professor Tilman's discussion concentrates on the structure of plant communities. All theoretical arguments are developed graphically, and formal mathematics is kept to a minimum. The final chapters of the book provide some testable speculations about resources and animal communities and explore such problems as the evolution of "super species," the differences between plant and animal community diversity patterns, and the cause of plant succession.
Author: S.E. Jorgensen Publisher: Elsevier ISBN: 1483290808 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 409
Book Description
The use of models to assess water quality is becoming increasingly important worldwide. In order to be able to develop a good model, it is necessary to have a good quantitative and ecological description of physical, chemical and biological processes in ecosystems. Such descriptions may be called ``submodels''. This book presents the most important, but not all, submodels applied in water quality modelling. Each chapter deals with a specific physical process and covers its importance, the most applicable submodels (and how to select one), parameter values and their determination, and future research needs.The book will be an excellent reference source for environmental engineers, ecological modellers and all those interested in the modelling of water quality systems.
Author: David Tilman Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 069118836X Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 368
Book Description
Spatial Ecology addresses the fundamental effects of space on the dynamics of individual species and on the structure, dynamics, diversity, and stability of multispecies communities. Although the ecological world is unavoidably spatial, there have been few attempts to determine how explicit considerations of space may alter the predictions of ecological models, or what insights it may give into the causes of broad-scale ecological patterns. As this book demonstrates, the spatial structure of a habitat can fundamentally alter both the qualitative and quantitative dynamics and outcomes of ecological processes. Spatial Ecology highlights the importance of space to five topical areas: stability, patterns of diversity, invasions, coexistence, and pattern generation. It illustrates both the diversity of approaches used to study spatial ecology and the underlying similarities of these approaches. Over twenty contributors address issues ranging from the persistence of endangered species, to the maintenance of biodiversity, to the dynamics of hosts and their parasitoids, to disease dynamics, multispecies competition, population genetics, and fundamental processes relevant to all these cases. There have been many recent advances in our understanding of the influence of spatially explicit processes on individual species and on multispecies communities. This book synthesizes these advances, shows the limitations of traditional, non-spatial approaches, and offers a variety of new approaches to spatial ecology that should stimulate ecological research.
Author: John P. Smol Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139492624 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 687
Book Description
This much revised and expanded edition provides a valuable and detailed summary of the many uses of diatoms in a wide range of applications in the environmental and earth sciences. Particular emphasis is placed on the use of diatoms in analysing ecological problems related to climate change, acidification, eutrophication, and other pollution issues. The chapters are divided into sections for easy reference, with separate sections covering indicators in different aquatic environments. A final section explores diatom use in other fields of study such as forensics, oil and gas exploration, nanotechnology, and archaeology. Sixteen new chapters have been added since the first edition, including introductory chapters on diatom biology and the numerical approaches used by diatomists. The extensive glossary has also been expanded and now includes over 1,000 detailed entries, which will help non-specialists to use the book effectively.
Author: Louis Donelle
Author: Louis Donelle
Author: Marcel Holyoak
Author: Robert Fletcher
Author: 
Author: Pedro Giovâni Da Silva
Author: Allison K. Barner
Author: David Tilman
Author: S.E. Jorgensen
Author: David Tilman
Author: John P. Smol