Functional trait assembly through ecological and evolutionary time |
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Authors: | James C Stegen Nathan G Swenson |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA;(2) Arnold Arboretum, Center for Tropical Forest Science—Asia Program, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA |
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Abstract: | A classic community assembly hypothesis is that all guilds must be represented before additional species from any given guild
enter the community. We conceptually extend this hypothesis to continuous functional traits, refine the hypothesis with an
eco-evolutionary model of interaction network community assembly, and compare the resultant continuous trait assembly rule
to empirical data. Our extension of the “guild assembly rule” to continuous functional traits was rejected, in part, because
the eco-evolutionary model predicted trait assembly to be characterized by the expansion of trait space and trait/species sorting within trait space. Hence, the guild rule may not be broadly applicable. A “revised” assembly rule
did, however, emerge from the eco-evolutionary model: as communities assemble, the range in trait values will increase to
a maximum and then remain relatively constant irrespective of further changes in species richness. This rule makes the corollary
prediction that the trait range will, on average, be a saturating function of species richness. To determine if the assembly
rule is at work in natural communities, we compared this corollary prediction to empirical data. Consistent with our assembly
rule, trait “space” (broadly defined) commonly saturates with species richness. Our assembly rule may thus represent a general
constraint placed on community assembly. In addition, taxonomic scale similarly influences the predicted and empirically observed
relationship between trait “space” and richness. Empirical support for the model’s predictions suggests that studying continuous
functional traits in the context of eco-evolutionary models is a powerful approach for elucidating general processes of community
assembly. |
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