Niche dissociated assembly drives insular lizard community organization.

ABSTRACT: Interspecific competition for resources leading to niche partitioning is considered as one of the major drivers of community assembly. Competitive niche partitioning is diagnosed from species co-occurrence, species abundance distributions (SADs), and body size distributions of species. For several decades, studies have explored these patterns for the relative significance of interspecific competition in shaping communities. We explored these patterns in a finite assemblage of insectivorous lizards in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, both at the level of archipelago and individual islands. Negative geographic co-occurrences occurred only between species pairs in islands separated by deep ocean channels. Ecologically similar species did not show positive co-occurrence in guild co-occurrence an

SUBMITTER: Harikrishnan S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6086863 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature