From plant traits to plant communities: a statistical mechanistic approach to biodiversity.
We developed a quantitative method, analogous to those used in statistical mechanics, to predict how biodiversity will vary across environments, which plant species from a species pool will be found in which relative abundances in a given environment, and which plant traits determine community assembly. This provides a scaling from plant traits to ecological communities while bypassing the complications of population dynamics. Our method treats community development as a sorting process involving species that are ecologically equivalent except with respect to particular functional traits, which leads to a constrained random assembly of species; the relative abundance of each species adheres to a general exponential distribution as a function of its traits. Using data for eight functional traits of 30 herbaceous species and community-aggregated values of these traits in 12 sites along a 42-year chronosequence of secondary succession, we predicted 94% of the variance in the relative abundances.
Shipley
Bill
B
Département de Biologie, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Quebec J1K 2R1, Canada. bill.shipley@usherbrooke.ca
Vile
Denis
D
Garnier
Eric
E
D044822:Biodiversity; D018533:Biomass; D004463:Ecology / Q000379:methods*; D017753:Ecosystem; D004777:Environment; D005602:France; D008433:Mathematics; D008954:Models, Biological; D015233:Models, Statistical; D063245:Plant Development; D018521:Plant Physiological Phenomena; D010944:Plants / Q000235:genetics; D011156:Population Density; D011157:Population Dynamics; D012641:Selection, Genetic