Strong species-environment feedback shapes plant community assembly along environmental gradients.

ABSTRACT: An aim of community ecology is to understand the patterns of competing species assembly along environmental gradients. All species interact with their environments. However, theories of community assembly have seldom taken into account the effects of species that are able to engineer the environment. In this modeling study, we integrate the species' engineering trait together with processes of immigration and local dispersal into a theory of community assembly. We quantify the species' engineering trait as the degree to which it can move the local environment away from its baseline state towards the optimum state of the species (species-environment feedback). We find that, in the presence of immigration from a regional pool, strong feedback can increase local species richness; however, in

SUBMITTER: Jiang J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3853557 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature