Department of Biology, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA.
Ecology. 2009 Dec;90(12):3418-29. doi: 10.1890/08-1885.1.
Predicting the effects of the loss of individual species on diversity represents one of the primary challenges facing community ecology. One pathway by which organisms of one species affect the distribution of species is ecosystem engineering. Changes in the dynamics of ecosystem engineers that lead to changes in the distribution of the patches of altered habitat are likely to lead to changes in diversity. I link data on the distribution of plant species found in the riparian zone of the Adirondacks (New York, USA) in patches modified by beaver and in unmodified forest patches to a model connecting the dynamics of ecosystem engineers to the dynamics of the patches that they create. These analyses demonstrate that changes in key parameters of the model, such as decreases in beaver colonization rates and rate of patch abandonment, lead to changes in species richness of up to 45% at the landscape scale, and that these changes are likely to occur over long time scales. This general approach of linking the population dynamics or behavior of a single species to changes in species richness at the landscape scale provides a means for both testing the importance of ecosystem engineering in different systems and developing scenarios to predict how changes in the dynamics of a single species are likely to affect species richness.
预测个别物种的消失对多样性的影响是群落生态学面临的主要挑战之一。一种生物通过生态系统工程影响物种分布的途径。生态系统工程师动态的变化导致改变生境斑块的分布，很可能导致多样性的变化。我将在阿迪朗达克（美国纽约）河岸带发现的植物物种的分布数据与一个将生态系统工程师的动态与它们所创造的斑块的动态联系起来的模型联系起来。这些分析表明，模型的关键参数的变化，如海狸殖民化率和斑块废弃率的降低，会导致景观尺度上物种丰富度的变化高达 45%，而且这些变化很可能发生在很长的时间尺度上。这种将单一物种的种群动态或行为与景观尺度上的物种丰富度变化联系起来的一般方法，为在不同系统中检验生态系统工程的重要性以及预测单一物种动态变化如何影响物种丰富度提供了一种手段。
