Ecological convergence in a rocky intertidal shore metacommunity despite high spatial variability in recruitment regimes.

ABSTRACT: In open ecological systems, community structure can be determined by physically modulated processes such as the arrival of individuals from a regional pool and by local biological interactions. There is debate centering on whether niche differentiation and local interactions among species are necessary to explain macroscopic community patterns or whether the patterns can be generated by the neutral interplay of dispersal and stochastic demography among ecologically identical species. Here we evaluate how much of the observed spatial variation within a rocky intertidal metacommunity along 800 km of coastline can be explained by drift in the structure of recruits across 15 local sites. Our results show that large spatial changes in recruitment do not explain the observed spatial variation in

SUBMITTER: Caro AU 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2972975 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature