School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA.
Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA.
Ecology. 2022 Jul;103(7):e3709. doi: 10.1002/ecy.3709. Epub 2022 May 12.
Understanding the ecological processes that maintain community function in systems experiencing species loss, and how these processes change over time, is key to understanding the relationship between community structure and function and predicting how communities may respond to perturbations in the Anthropocene. Using a 30-year experiment on desert rodents, we show that the impact of species loss on community-level energy use has changed repeatedly and dramatically over time, due to (1) the addition of new species to the community, and (2) a reduction in functional redundancy among the same set of species. Although strong compensation, initially driven by the dispersal of functionally redundant species to the local community, occurred in this system from 1997 to 2010, since 2010, compensation has broken down due to decreasing functional overlap within the same set of species. Simultaneously, long-term changes in sitewide community composition due to niche complementarity have decoupled the dynamics of compensation from the overall impact of species loss on community-level energy use. Shifting, context-dependent compensatory dynamics, such as those demonstrated here, highlight the importance of explicitly long-term, metacommunity, and eco-evolutionary perspectives on the link between species-level fluctuations and community function in a changing world.
了解在经历物种丧失的系统中维持群落功能的生态过程，以及这些过程随时间的变化，是理解群落结构和功能之间关系以及预测群落如何应对人类世干扰的关键。本研究利用对沙漠啮齿动物进行的 30 年实验，表明由于（1）群落中新增物种的出现，以及（2）同一组物种之间功能冗余的减少，物种丧失对群落水平能量利用的影响在时间上反复且剧烈地发生了变化。尽管在 1997 年至 2010 年期间，由于功能冗余物种的扩散，该系统中最初出现了强烈的补偿，但自 2010 年以来，由于同一组物种内功能重叠的减少，补偿已经失效。同时，由于生态位互补导致的整个社区组成的长期变化，使补偿的动态与物种丧失对群落水平能量利用的总体影响脱钩。像这里所展示的这种转移的、依赖于背景的补偿动态，突出了在不断变化的世界中，从长期的、复合社区和生态进化角度来明确物种波动和群落功能之间联系的重要性。
