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Species reordering,not changes in richness,drives long‐term dynamics in grassland communities
Authors:Sydney K. Jones  Julie Ripplinger  Scott L. Collins
Affiliation:1. Department of Biology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA;2. Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA
Abstract:Determining how ecological communities will respond to global environmental change remains a challenging research problem. Recent meta‐analyses concluded that most communities are undergoing compositional change despite no net change in local species richness. We explored how species richness and composition of co‐occurring plant, grasshopper, breeding bird and small mammal communities in arid and mesic grasslands changed in response to increasing aridity and fire frequency. In the arid system, grassland and shrubland plant and breeding bird communities were undergoing directional change, whereas grasshopper and small mammal communities were stable. In the mesic system, all communities were undergoing directional change regardless of fire frequency. Despite directional change in composition in some communities, species richness of all communities did not change because compositional change resulted more from reordering of species abundances than turnover in species composition. Thus, species reordering, not changes in richness, explains long‐term dynamics in these grass and shrub dominated communities.
Keywords:Community dynamics  desert grassland  desert shrubland  fire  species reordering  species richness  tallgrass prairie
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