Department of Zoology, 3029 Cordley Hall, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97331, USA.
Ecol Lett. 2011 Dec;14(12):1201-10. doi: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2011.01690.x. Epub 2011 Oct 10.
Although positive species interactions are ubiquitous in nature, theory has generally focused on the role of negative interactions to explain patterns of species diversity. Here, we incorporate recruitment facilitation, a positive interaction prevalent in marine and terrestrial systems, into a metacommunity framework to assess how the interplay between colonisation, competition and facilitation mediates coexistence. We show that when subordinate species facilitate the recruitment of dominant species, multi-species metacommunities can persist stably even if the colonisation rate of the dominant species is greater than that of the subordinate species. In addition, recruitment facilitation can buffer population growth from changes in colonisation rates, and thus explain the paradoxical mismatch between patterns of abundance and recruitment in marine systems. Overall, our results demonstrate that recruitment facilitation can have profound effects on the assembly, dissolution and regulation of metacommunities by mediating the relative influence of local and regional processes on population abundance and species diversity.
虽然在自然界中，正种间相互作用普遍存在，但理论通常侧重于负相互作用在解释物种多样性模式中的作用。在这里，我们将一种在海洋和陆地系统中普遍存在的正相互作用——繁殖促进作用纳入集合群落框架，以评估在殖民化、竞争和促进作用相互作用下，共存是如何被调节的。我们表明，当从属物种促进优势物种的繁殖时，即使优势物种的殖民化率大于从属物种的殖民化率，多物种集合群落也可以稳定地持续存在。此外，繁殖促进作用可以缓冲种群增长对殖民化率变化的影响，从而解释海洋系统中生物量和繁殖模式之间矛盾的不匹配现象。总的来说，我们的结果表明，繁殖促进作用可以通过调节局部和区域过程对种群丰度和物种多样性的相对影响，对集合群落的组装、解体和调节产生深远的影响。
