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Community assembly along a species pool gradient: implications for multiple-scale patterns of species diversity

  • Original Article
  • Special Feature: Multiple spatial scale approaches in population and community ecology
  • Published:
Population Ecology

Abstract

Various ecological processes influence patterns of species diversity at multiple spatial scales. One process that is potentially important but rarely considered is community assembly. I assembled model communities using species pools of differing size to examine how the history of community assembly may affect multi-scale diversity patterns. The model contained three scales at which diversity could be measured: local community, metacommunity, and species pool. Local species saturation occurred, as expected from the competition and predation built in the model. However, local communities did not become resistant to invasions except when the species pool was very small. Depending on dispersal rate and trophic level, the larger the species pool, the harder it was to predict which species invades which local community at a given time. Consequently, local-community dissimilarity maintained by assembly history increased linearly with pool size, even though local diversity was decoupled from pool size. These results have two implications for multi-scale diversity patterns. First, assembly history may provide an explanation for scale-dependent relationships between local and regional diversity: assembly causes the relationship to be curvilinear at one scale (local community), while linear at another (metacommunity). Second, assembly history influences how γ-diversity is partitioned into α- and β-diversity: assembly causes the relative contribution of β to increase with pool size. Overall, this study suggests that community assembly history interacts with species pool size to regulate multi-scale patterns of species diversity.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Masahiro Nakaoka and Takashi Noda for inviting me to contribute to this Special Feature. I thank Richard Law and Chris Cosner for technical advice and Marc Cadotte, Jon Chase, Jim Drake, Sean McMahon, Mac Post, Susan Riechert, Jon Shurin, Dan Simberloff, Diane Srivastava, Chris Steiner, Diego Vázquez, and two insightful anonymous reviewers for comments. Aaron King deserves special thanks for numerous discussions that improved this paper. This research was funded by the US National Science Foundation (DEB-0206598) and the Yates Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

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  1. Tadashi Fukami

    Present address: Landcare Research, PO Box 69, Lincoln, New Zealand

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  1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA

    Tadashi Fukami

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Fukami, T. Community assembly along a species pool gradient: implications for multiple-scale patterns of species diversity. Popul Ecol 46, 137–147 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10144-004-0182-z

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