Quantitative predictions about the processes that promote species coexistence are a subject of active research in ecology. In particular, competitive interactions are known to shape and maintain ecological communities, and situations where some species out-compete or dominate over some others are key to describe natural ecosystems. Here we develop ecological theory using a stochastic, synthetic framework for plant community assembly that leads to predictions amenable to empirical testing. We propose two stochastic continuous-time Markov models that incorporate competitive dominance through a hierarchy of species heights. The first model, which is spatially implicit, predicts both the expected number of species that survive and the conditions under which heights are clustered in realized model communities. The second one allows spatially-explicit interactions of individuals and alternative mechanisms that can help shorter plants overcome height-driven competition, and it demonstrates that clustering patterns remain not only locally but also across increasing spatial scales. Moreover, although plants are actually height-clustered in the spatially-explicit model, it allows for plant species abundances not necessarily skewed to taller plants.
In plant-pollinator communities many pollinators are potential generalists and their preferences for certain plants can change quickly in response to changes in plant and pollinator densities. These changes in preferences affect coexistence within pollinator guilds as well as within plant guilds. Using a mathematical model, we study how adaptations of pollinator preferences influence population dynamics of a two-plant-two-pollinator community interaction module. Adaptation leads to coexistence between generalist and specialist pollinators, and produces complex plant population dynamics, involv…
Understanding the main determinants of species coexistence across space and time is a central question in ecology. However, ecologists still know little about the scales and conditions at which biotic interactions matter and how these interact with the environment to structure species assemblages. Here we use recent theory developments to analyze plant distribution and trait data across Europe and find that plant height clustering is related to both evapotranspiration and gross primary productivity. This clustering is a signal of interspecies competition between plants, which is most evident i…
Life-history tradeoffs among species are major drivers of community assembly. Most studies investigate how tradeoffs promote deterministic coexistence of species. It remains unclear how tradeoffs may instead promote historically contingent exclusion of species, where species dominance is affected by initial abundances, causing alternative community states. Focusing on the establishment-longevity tradeoff, we study the transient dynamics and equilibrium outcomes of competitive interactions in a simulation model of plant community assembly. We show that, in this model, the establishment-longevit…
We present an analytically tractable variant of the voter model that provides a quantitatively accurate description of beta-diversity (two-point correlation function) in two tropical forests. The model exhibits novel scaling behavior that leads to links between ecological measures such as relative species abundance and the species area relationship.
This review focuses on microbiomes associated with residues within the context of other microbial habitats in cereal-producing agroecosystems such as phyllosphere or rhizosphere. We connect residue microbiome with the survival of residue-borne fungal plant pathogens, thus combining knowledge in microbial ecology and epidemiology, two disciplines still not sufficiently connected. We provide an overview of the impact of residues on cereal disease epidemics and how dynamic interactions between microbial communities of non-buried residues during their degradation, along with soil and multitude of …
Statistical Physics has proved essential to analyze multi-agent environments. Motivated by the empirical observation of various non-equilibrium features in Barro Colorado and other ecological systems, we analyze a plant-species abundance model, presenting analytical evidence of scale-invariant plant clusters and non-trivial emergent modular correlations. Such first theoretical confirmation of a scale-invariant region, based on percolation processes, reproduces the key features in actual ecological ecosystems and can confer the most stable equilibrium for ecosystems with vast biodiversity.
Ecological theory predicts that the soil seed bank stabilises the composition of annual plant communities in the face of environmental variability. However, long-term data on the community dynamics in the seed bank and the standing vegetation are needed to test this prediction. We tested the hypothesis that the composition of the seed bank undergoes lower temporal variability than the standing vegetation in a nine-year study in Mediterranean, semi-arid, and arid ecosystems. The composition of the seed bank was estimated by collecting soil cores from the studied sites on an annual basis. Seedli…
Ecological trade-offs between species are often invoked to explain species coexistence in ecological communities. However, few mathematical models have been proposed for which coexistence conditions can be characterized explicitly in terms of a trade-off. Here we present a model of a plant community which allows such a characterization. In the model plant species compete for sites where each site has a fixed stress condition. Species differ both in stress tolerance and competitive ability. Stress tolerance is quantified as the fraction of sites with stress conditions low enough to allow establ…
Species accumulation curves (SAC), i.e. the relationship between species richness and the number of sampling units in a given community, can be used to describe diversity patterns while accounting for the well-known scale-dependence of species richness. Despite their value, the functional form and the parameters of SAC, as well as their determinants, have barely been investigated in plant communities, particularly in drylands. We characterized the SAC of perennial plant communities from 233 dryland ecosystems from six continents by comparing the fit of major functions (power-law, logarithmic a…
Dynamic interspecific interactions are thought to contribute to fundamental structures of ecological communities. Using the Yodzis framework of dominance control versus founder control versus niche control, the importance of intransitive loops in sub-communities in a source/sink or metacommunity competition context is examined. It is found that a three-species sub-community sampled from a species pool composed of nothing but dominance controlled species pairs can result in a stable three species coexistence. It is shown that if effect and response competition are balanced, the overall sub-comm…
We introduce a new dominance concept consisting of three new dominance metrics based on Lloyd's (1967) mean crowding index. The new metrics link communities and species, whereas existing ones are applicable only to communities. Our community-level metric is a function of Simpson's diversity index. For species, our metric quantifies the difference between community dominance and the dominance of a virtual community whose mean population size (per species) equals the population size of the focal species. The new metrics have at least two immediate applications: (i) acting as proxies for diversit…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field experiment has explicitly shown that communities of competing plant species can experience very fast phenotypic diversification, and that this gives rise to enhanced complementarity in resource exploitation and to enlarged ecosystem-level productivity. Here, we build on progress made in recent years in the integration of eco-evolutionary dynamics, and presen…
The far-reaching consequences of ecological interactions in the dynamics of biological communities remain an intriguing subject. For decades, competition has been a cornerstone in ecological processes, but mounting evidence shows that cooperation does also contribute to the structure of biological communities. Here, we propose a simple deterministic model for the study of the effects of facilitation and competition in the dynamics of such systems. The simultaneous inclusion of both effects produces rich dynamics and captures the context-dependence observed in the formation of ecological commun…
Coextinction models are useful to understand community robustness to species loss and resilience to disturbances. We simulated pollinator extinctions in pollination networks by using a hybrid model that combined a recently developed stochastic coextinction model (SCM) for plant extinctions and a topological model (TCM) for animal extinctions. Our model accounted for variation in interaction strengths and included empirical estimates of plant dependence on pollinators to set seeds. The stochastic nature of such model allowed us determining plant survival to single (and multiple) extinction even…
The recent realization that entire communities fuse and separate (community coalescence) has led to a reappraisal of the forces determining species diversity and dynamics, especially in microbial communities where coalescence is likely widespread. To understand if connectedness by coalescence results in different outcomes from connectedness by individual dispersal, we investigated chance processes leading to loss of species diversity using a model of a neutral two-species metacommunity. Two scenarios were investigated: pairwise coalescence where the communities coalesce in pairs, intermix and …
Despite the common misconception of nearly static organisms, plants do interact continuously with the environment and with each other. It is fair to assume that during their evolution they developed particular features to overcome problems and to exploit possibilities from environment. In this paper we introduce various quantitative measures based on recent advancements in complex network theory that allow to measure the effective similarities of various species. By using this approach on the similarity in fruit-typology ecological traits we obtain a clear plant classification in a way similar…
Current theories about mechanisms promoting species co-existence in diverse communities assume that species only interact ecologically. Species are treated as discrete evolutionary entities, even though abundant empirical evidence indicates that patterns of gene flow such as selfing and hybridization frequently occur in plant and animal groups. Here, we allow mating behavior to respond to local species composition and abundance in a data-driven meta-community model of species co-existence. While individuals primarily out-cross, they also maintain some small capacity for selfing and hybridizati…
We derive an analytical approximation for making quantitative predictions for ecological communities as a function of the mean intensity of the inter-specific competition and the species richness. This method, with only a fraction of the model parameters (carrying capacities and competition coefficients), is able to predict accurately empirical measurements covering a wide variety of taxa (algae, plants, protozoa).
Determining the relative importance of environmental factors, biotic interactions and stochasticity in assembling and maintaining species-rich communities remains a major challenge in ecology. In plant communities, interactions between individuals of different species are expected to leave a spatial signature in the form of positive or negative spatial correlations over distances relating to the spatial scale of interaction. Most studies using spatial point process tools have found relatively little evidence for interactions between pairs of species. More interactions tend to be detected in co…
We analyze several florae (collections of plant species populating specific areas) in different geographic and climatic regions. For every list of species we produce a taxonomic classification tree and we consider its statistical properties. We find that regardless of the geographical location, the climate and the environment all species collections have universal statistical properties that we show to be also robust in time. We then compare observed data sets with simulated communities obtained by randomly sampling a large pool of species from all over the world. We find differences in the be…
The large variation in seed mass among species inspired a vast array of theoretical and empirical research attempting to explain this variation. So far, seed mass variation was investigated by two classes of studies: one class focuses on species varying in seed mass within communities, while the second focuses on variation between communities, most often with respect to resource gradients. Here, we develop a model capable of simultaneously explaining variation in seed mass within and between communities. The model describes resource competition (for both soil and light resources) in annual com…
For classic Lotka-Volterra systems governing many interacting species, we establish an exclusion principle that rules out the existence of linearly asymptotically stable steady states in subcommunitites of communities that admit a stable state which is internally D-stable. This type of stability is known to be ensured, e.g., by diagonal dominance or Volterra-Lyapunov stability conditions. By consequence, the number of stable steady states of this type is bounded by Sperner's lemma on anti-chains in a poset. The number of stable steady states can nevertheless be very large if there are many gro…
Ecosystems are governed by dynamic processes such as competition for resources, reproduction and dispersal. These shape their biodiversity and how the system responds to change. Current approaches to modelling ecosystems, especially plants, focus on either describing fine-scale processes for individual species or broad-scale patterns for limited groups of plant functional types. Digitisation of herbarium and other plant records has unlocked a wealth of information that can be used to drive models of plant communities and make predictions for their future under different scenarios of climate ch…
Mutualistic networks are formed when the interactions between two classes of species are mutually beneficial. They are important examples of cooperation shaped by evolution. Mutualism between animals and plants plays a key role in the organization of ecological communities. Such networks in ecology have generically evolved a nested architecture independent of species composition and latitude - specialists interact with proper subsets of the nodes with whom generalists interact. Despite sustained efforts to explain observed network structure on the basis of community-level stability or persiste…
In the last years, a remarkable theoretical effort has been made in order to understand stability and complexity in ecological communities. The non-random structures of real ecological interaction networks has been recognized as one key ingredient contributing to the coexistence between high complexity and stability in real ecosystems. However most of the theoretical studies have considered communities with only one interaction type (either antagonistic, competitive, or mutualistic). Recently it has been proposed a theoretical analysis on multiple interaction types in ecological systems, concl…
Mutualism is a biological interaction mutually beneficial for both species involved, such as the interaction between plants and their pollinators. Real mutualistic communities can be understood as weighted bipartite networks and they present a nested structure and truncated power law degree and strength distributions. We present a novel link aggregation model that works on a strength-preferential attachment rule based on the Individual Neutrality hypothesis. The model generates mutualistic networks with emergent nestedness and truncated distributions. We provide some analytical results and com…
Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；Barcelona Collaboratorium（巴塞罗那协作实验室）；University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Santa Fe Institute（圣塔菲研究所）；Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (CSIC-UPF)（进化生物学研究所（CSIC-UPF））
