Center for Advanced Studies in Ecology and Biodiversity and Estación Costera de Investigaciones Marinas, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, C.P. 8331150, Chile.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2010 Oct 26;107(43):18528-32. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1007077107. Epub 2010 Oct 11.
In open ecological systems, community structure can be determined by physically modulated processes such as the arrival of individuals from a regional pool and by local biological interactions. There is debate centering on whether niche differentiation and local interactions among species are necessary to explain macroscopic community patterns or whether the patterns can be generated by the neutral interplay of dispersal and stochastic demography among ecologically identical species. Here we evaluate how much of the observed spatial variation within a rocky intertidal metacommunity along 800 km of coastline can be explained by drift in the structure of recruits across 15 local sites. Our results show that large spatial changes in recruitment do not explain the observed spatial variation in adult local structure and that, in comparison with the large drift in structure of recruits, local adult communities converged to a common, although not unique, structure across the region. Although there is no unique adult community structure in the entire region, the observed variation represents only a small subset of the possible structures that would be expected from passive recruitment drift. Thus, in this diverse system our results do not support the idea that rocky intertidal metacommunities are structured by neutral mechanisms.
在开放生态系统中，群落结构可以由物理调节过程决定，例如个体从区域库中到达，以及由局部生物相互作用决定。目前存在争议的焦点是，种间生态位分化和局部相互作用是否有必要来解释宏观群落模式，或者这些模式是否可以通过扩散和生态相似物种之间的随机种群动态的中性相互作用产生。在这里，我们评估了在 800 公里的海岸线沿线的岩石潮间带后生动物元群落中，有多少观察到的空间变异可以用 15 个局部地点的补充个体结构中的漂变来解释。我们的结果表明，补充个体结构中的大的空间变化并不能解释成年局部结构的观察到的空间变异，而且与补充个体结构中的大的漂变相比，当地成年群落之间在整个区域收敛为一个共同的、尽管不是唯一的结构。尽管整个区域没有唯一的成年群落结构，但观察到的变异只代表了从被动补充漂变中预期的可能结构的一小部分。因此，在这个多样化的系统中，我们的结果不支持岩石潮间带后生动物元群落由中性机制构建的观点。
