The proportion of core species in a community varies with spatial scale and environmental heterogeneity.

ABSTRACT: Ecological communities are composed of a combination of core species that maintain local viable populations and transient species that occur infrequently due to dispersal from surrounding regions. Preliminary work indicates that while core and transient species are both commonly observed in community surveys of a wide range of taxonomic groups, their relative prevalence varies substantially from one community to another depending upon the spatial scale at which the community was characterized and its environmental context. We used a geographically extensive dataset of 968 bird community time series to quantitatively describe how the proportion of core species in a community varies with spatial scale and environmental heterogeneity. We found that the proportion of core species in an assembl

SUBMITTER: Jenkins MF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6276595 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature