Physiology underlies the assembly of ecological communities.

ABSTRACT: Trait-based community ecology promises an understanding of the factors that determine species abundances and distributions across habitats. However, ecologists are often faced with large suites of potentially important traits, making generalizations across ecosystems and species difficult or even impossible. Here, we hypothesize that key traits structuring ecological communities may be causally dependent on common physiological mechanisms and that elucidating these mechanisms can help us understand the distributions of traits and species across habitats. We test this hypothesis by investigating putatively causal relationships between physiological and behavioral traits at the species and community levels in larvae of 17 species of dragonfly that co-occur at the landscape scale but segregat

SUBMITTER: Start D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6003365 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature