Loreau M
Laboratoire de Zoologie systématique et d'Ecologie animale, C.P. 160, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 50 av. Roosevelt, B-1050, Bruxelles, Belgium.
Oecologia. 1989 Oct;81(1):89-96. doi: 10.1007/BF00377014.
It is first shown that den Boer's (1985) claims that competition should be rejected as a factor explaining community structure are not warranted by his tests on temporal niche differentiation in carabid beetles. The power of these tests is so low that they are unlikely to detect even the most extreme pattern of niche differentiation. A major factor that affects their power is the procedure of building up an artificial species pool from the local communities to which the test is to be applied. Alternative tests are then presented, and applied to data on annual activity cycles of carabids in three forest biotopes in Belgium. Three factors are shown to strongly affect their outcome: the unit into which the time scale is divided, the criteria used to incorporate constraints, and the set of species selected. Nevertheless, they provide some evidence that there is a growing niche differentiation from the successional to the climax forest, as predicted by competition theory. Other hypotheses, however, could explain the observed pattern.
首先表明，登博尔（1985年）声称竞争作为解释群落结构的一个因素应被摒弃，但其关于步甲科甲虫时间生态位分化的测试并不能证明这一观点。这些测试的效力很低，以至于它们甚至不太可能检测到最极端的生态位分化模式。影响其效力的一个主要因素是从要应用该测试的当地群落构建人工物种库的过程。然后提出了替代测试，并将其应用于比利时三个森林生物群落中步甲科甲虫年度活动周期的数据。结果表明，有三个因素强烈影响其结果：时间尺度划分的单位、纳入限制条件所使用的标准以及所选择的物种集。然而，正如竞争理论所预测的，它们提供了一些证据，表明从演替森林到顶极森林，生态位分化在不断增加。然而，其他假说也可以解释观察到的模式。
