Trends in Ecology & Evolution
Rebuilding community ecology from functional traits
Section snippets
Whither community ecology?
Community ecology is the study of a set of species co-occurring at a given time and place. MacArthur suggested that the goal of community ecology (as of all science) is to find general rules [1], whereas Lawton [2] suggested that ‘community ecology is a mess’ with respect to this search. Simberloff [3] countered that general rules cannot be achieved owing to the complex nature of communities. We disagree with Simberloff's view and suggest that there is hope for general rules in community
Functional traits research program
The four themes that we suggest are traits, environmental gradients, the interaction milieu and performance currencies. These themes are linked by taking a more physiological approach, by using concepts that are measurable in well defined units and by avoiding short-term population dynamics:
Returning to fundamental and realized niches
The framework that ties these four themes together into a coherent theory is the idea of the fundamental versus realized niche [25]. Current efforts to study fundamental niches focus on measuring growth or growth surrogates in relation to environmental variables [i.e. physiological response curves (PRCs); Figure 1a]. Similarly, current approaches to realized niches involve habitat modeling [26] and gradient analysis [27] (Figure 1b), whereas current models of the transformation from fundamental
Prioritizing factors
Many factors (e.g. traits, environmental variables and performance currencies) could influence community structure. However, it is impossible to treat every factor equally and to study each variable and all interaction terms simultaneously. Even three traits and three environmental variables, each studied at five levels, would require a prohibitive number of measurements (53+3=15 625 treatments in a complete design). Factors must thus be prioritized using existing knowledge of the study system (
Contrast with other approaches
How does the functional trait approach compare with other community ecology approaches? Three common approaches (mainstream empirical studies of species interactions, community-matrices and neutral theory) stand in strong contrast to what we propose.
Past empirical studies of species interactions covers a range of work, some of which fits well into the functional trait research program 5, 27, 30, 38, 40, 41, 42. However, we suggest that much of this work differs from the functional trait-based
Limitations and benefits of functional trait-focused community ecology
Where the goal is to understand a single species or pair of species at a single site (e.g. for conservation), the focus on population demographics and on pairwise species interactions with strong competitor or predator species can be more productive than a trait-focused approach. Where the goal is a more mechanistic understanding of communities comprised of many species, especially in relation to physical geography, a functional-traits-on-gradients approach will be more successful. Sometimes,
Why now?
A research focus that highlights how functional traits are distributed across gradients, especially in the light of what characterizes the fundamental and realized niche, has been around in some fashion for >100 years (e.g. 25, 59, 60, 61) and probably seems obvious. In spite of this, its importance to community ecology is routinely overlooked in favor of population dynamic models of species interactions. Here, we are calling for a return to the trait and environment-focused route. The fact
Acknowledgements
This paper started as a symposium on ‘New paradigms in community ecology’ at Ecological Society of America's annual meeting in Portland (2004). We thank the other speakers at this forum whose ideas influenced us: Brian Maurer, Gary Mittelbach and Mike Rosenzweig. We also thank A. J. Kerkhoff, M. Lechowicz, J. Pither and N. Swenson for discussion and feedback on the article. B.J.M. thanks the NSF Interdisciplinary Informatics Postdoctoral Fellowship for funding. B.J.E. was supported by an NSF
Glossary
- Community matrix:
- a square (S×S) matrix describing interactions in a community with S species. The community matrix, together with a vector of intrinsic rates of increase (r), specifies the parameters of the generalized (S species) Lotka–Volterra differential equations, which can be solved for equilibrium abundances (N).
- Distinct preference niche:
- a model of a niche in which each closely related species has a performance optimum at a different point along an environmental gradient (Figure 1c, main
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