More than the sum of the parts: annual partitioning within spatial guilds underpins community regulation.

ABSTRACT: To withstand the pressures of a rapidly changing world, resilient ecosystems should exhibit compensatory dynamics, including uncorrelated temporal shifts in population sizes. The observation that diversity is maintained through time in many systems is evidence that communities are indeed regulated and stabilized, yet empirical observations suggest that positive covariance in species abundances is widespread. This paradox could be resolved if communities are composed of a number of ecologically relevant sub-units in which the members compete for resources, but whose abundances fluctuate independently. Such modular organization could explain community regulation, even when the community as a whole appears synchronized. To test this hypothesis, we quantified temporal synchronicity in annual p

SUBMITTER: Magurran AE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6083250 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature