ArticleAnnals of botany2015
How tree species fill geographic and ecological space in eastern North America.
Article in Annals of botany, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Successful microbial colonization of space in a more dispersed manner.ISME communications · 2021Article
- Biased-corrected richness estimates for the Amazonian tree flora.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Amazon plant diversity revealed by a taxonomically verified species list.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- The discovery of the Amazonian tree flora with an updated checklist of all known tree taxa.Scientific reports · 2016Article
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1 author.
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Abstract
BACKGROUND AND
aimsEcologists broadly accept that the number of species present within a region balances regional processes of immigration and speciation against competitive and other interactions between populations that limit distribution and constrain diversity. Although ecological theory has, for a long time, addressed the premise that ecological space can be filled to 'capacity' with species, only with the availability of time-calibrated phylogenies has it been possible to test the hypothesis that diversification slows as the number of species in a region increases. Focusing on the deciduous trees of eastern North America, this study tested predictions from competition theory concerning the distribution and abundance of species.
methodsLocal assemblages of trees tabulated in a previous study published in 1950 were analysed. Assemblages were ordinated with respect to species composition by non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMS). Distributions of trees were analysed by taxonomically nested analysis of variance, discriminant analysis based on NMS scores, and canonical correlation analysis of NMS scores and Bioclim climate variables. KEY
resultsMost of the variance in species abundance and distribution was concentrated among closely related (i.e. congeneric) species, indicating evolutionary lability. Species distribution and abundance were unrelated to the number of close relatives, suggesting that competitive effects are diffuse. Distances between pairs of congeneric species in NMS space did not differ significantly from distances between more distantly related species, in contrast to the predictions of both competitive habitat partitioning and ecological sorting of species.
conclusionsEastern deciduous forests of North America do not appear to be saturated with species. The distributions and abundances of individual species provide little evidence of being shaped by competition from related (i.e. ecologically similar) species and, by inference, that diversification is constrained by interspecific competition.
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