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Predictions of biodiversity are improved by integrating trait-based competition with abiotic filtering
- Source :
- Ecology Letters, bioRxiv, BioRxiv (preprint)
- Publication Year :
- 2022
- Publisher :
- Wiley, 2022.
-
Abstract
- All organisms must simultaneously tolerate the environment and access limiting resources if they are to persist. Otherwise they go extinct. Approaches to understanding environmental tolerance and resource competition have generally been developed independently. Consequently, integrating the factors that determine abiotic tolerance with those that affect competitive interactions to model species abundances and community structure remains an unresolved challenge. This is likely the reason why current models of community assembly do not accurately predict species abundances and dynamics. Here, we introduce a new synthetic framework that models both abiotic tolerance and biotic competition by using functional traits, which are phenotypic attributes that influence organism fitness. First, our framework estimates species carrying capacities that vary along abiotic gradients based on whether the phenotype tolerates the local environment. Second, it estimates pairwise competitive interactions as a function of multidimensional trait differences between species and determines which trait combinations produce the most competitive phenotypes. We demonstrate that our combined approach more than doubles the explained variance of species covers in a wetland community compared to the model of abiotic tolerances alone. Trait-based integration of competitive interactions and abiotic filtering improves our ability to predict species abundances across space, bringing us closer to more accurate predictions of biodiversity structure in a changing world.
- Subjects :
- 0106 biological sciences
community modelling
media_common.quotation_subject
Biodiversity
Biology
010603 evolutionary biology
01 natural sciences
Competition (biology)
species abundances
abiotic filtering
570 Biowissenschaften, Biologie
ddc:580
functional trait
plant ecology
Organism
Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Ecosystem
media_common
Abiotic component
Ecology
010604 marine biology & hydrobiology
Community structure
15. Life on land
Explained variation
wetland
580 Pflanzen (Botanik)
Phenotype
Trait
Pairwise comparison
ddc:570
abiotic filtering, community modelling, competition, functional trait, plant ecology, species abundances, wetland
competition
Subjects
Details
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Ecology Letters, bioRxiv, BioRxiv (preprint)
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....e7c3083d73639bd4e96f4ed58f740f3e