Publication

Experimental evidence for strong stabilizing forces at high functional diversity of aquatic microbial communities

Abstract

Unveiling the mechanisms that promote coexistence in biological communities is a fundamental problem in ecology. Stable coexistence of many species is commonly observed in natural communities. Most of these natural communities, however, are composed of species from multiple trophic and functional groups, while theory and experiments on coexistence have been focusing on functionally similar species. Here, we investigated how functional diversity affects the stability of species coexistence and productivity in multispecies communities by characterizing experimentally all pairwise species interactions in a pool of 11 species of eukaryotes (10 protists and one rotifer) belonging to three different functional groups. Species within the same functional group showed stronger competitive interactions compared to among-functional group interactions. This often led to competitive exclusion between species that had higher functional relatedness, but only at low levels of species richness. Communities with higher functional diversity resulted in increased species coexistence and community biomass production. Our experimental findings and the results of a stochastic model tailored to the experimental interaction matrix suggest the emergence of strong stabilizing forces when species from different functional groups interact in a homogeneous environment. By combining theoretical analysis with experiments we could also disentangle the relationship between species richness and functional diversity, showing that functional diversity per se is a crucial driver of productivity and stability in multispecies community.

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Ontological neighbourhood
Related concepts (36)
Invasive species
An invasive or alien species is an introduced species to an environment that becomes overpopulated and harms its new environment. Invasive species adversely affect habitats and bioregions, causing ecological, environmental, and/or economic damage. The term can also be used for native species that become harmful to their native environment after human alterations to its food web - for example, the purple sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus) which has decimated kelp forests along the northern California coast due to overharvesting of its natural predator, the California sea otter (Enhydra lutris).
Species
In biology, a species (: species) is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction. It is the basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. Other ways of defining species include their karyotype, DNA sequence, morphology, behaviour, or ecological niche. In addition, paleontologists use the concept of the chronospecies since fossil reproduction cannot be examined.
Species diversity
Species diversity is the number of different species that are represented in a given community (a dataset). The effective number of species refers to the number of equally abundant species needed to obtain the same mean proportional species abundance as that observed in the dataset of interest (where all species may not be equally abundant). Meanings of species diversity may include species richness, taxonomic or phylogenetic diversity, and/or species evenness. Species richness is a simple count of species.
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