Abstract
Dryland ecosystems are likely to respond discontinuously to gradual changes in environmental conditions. Direct facilitation between plants, whereby plants improve the local environmental conditions for others, has been shown to be a mechanism contributing to these discontinuous ecosystem transitions. Theoretical models describing dryland vegetation dynamics often consider a single plant species and one type of facilitation, namely direct facilitation. However, another type of facilitation–indirect facilitation–is widespread in dryland ecosystems as well; it is performed by plants protected against grazing, the nurses, when this protection extends to other plants growing in their neighbourhood that are deprived of such protection, the protegees. Little is known about the long-term effects of indirect facilitation on dryland dynamics. Here, we developed and analysed a theoretical model including two species–a nurse and a protegee–and indirect facilitation through grazing. We investigated the effects of indirect facilitation on species composition, species spatial clustering and the stability of dryland ecosystems. We showed that indirect facilitation through grazing enables the stable coexistence of the nurse and the protegee and allows the reversibility of the protegee extinction. Surprisingly, the strength of indirect facilitation affected neither the total nor the interspecific vegetation clustering. Our study highlights that spatially explicit grazing protection may affect species composition and the stability of dryland ecosystems and gives hints about how species interactions translate into spatial clustering.
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19 January 2021
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12080-020-00499-y
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers who have helped us improve the manuscript. The analysis of the model benefited from the Montpellier Bioinformatics Biodiversity platform supported by the LabEx CeMEB, an ANR “Investissements d’avenir” program (ANR-10-LABX-04-01).
Funding
The research study has received a funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 283068 (CASCADE project). AD was funded by the ANR project ECOSTAB (ANR-17-CE32-0002/ECOSTAB). The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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AD, FDS and SK contributed to the study conception and design. Model development and analysis were performed by AD. The first draft of the manuscript was written by AD, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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The original online version of this article was revised: The 2nd affiliation of Sonia Kéfi was missing. The said affiliation is now added correctly here as affiliation 6: Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA. The original article has been corrected.
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Danet, A., Schneider, F.D., Anthelme, F. et al. Indirect facilitation drives species composition and stability in drylands. Theor Ecol 14, 189–203 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12080-020-00489-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12080-020-00489-0