Jones, Faith
- University of St Andrews
Abstract
Ecological assemblages are inherently uneven, with numerically dominant species contributing disproportionately to ecosystem services. Marked biodiversity change due to growing pressures on the world's ecosystems is now well documented. However, the hypothesis that dominant species are becoming relatively more abundant has not been tested. We examined the prediction that the dominance structure of contemporary communities is shifting, using a meta-analysis of 110 assemblage timeseries. Changes in relative and absolute dominance were evaluated with mixed and cyclic-shift permutation models. Our analysis uncovered no evidence of a systematic change in either form of dominance, but established that relative dominance is preserved even when assemblage size (total N) changes. This suggests that dominance structure is regulated alongside richness and assemblage size, and highlights the importance of investigating multiple components of assemblage diversity when evaluating ecosystem responses to environmental drivers.
Keywords
dominance; time series; assemblage; biodiversity
Published in
Biology Letters
2018, volume: 14, number: 6, article number: 20180187
Publisher: The Royal Society
SLU Authors
UKÄ Subject classification
Ecology
Publication identifier
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2018.0187
Permanent link to this page (URI)
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/127610