Buche Lisa, Shoemaker Lauren G, Hallett Lauren M, Bartomeus Ignasi, Vesk Peter, Weiss-Lehman Christopher, Mayfield Margaret, Godoy Oscar
School of Biosciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia.
Department of Botany, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming, USA.
Ecol Lett. 2025 Jan;28(1):e70059. doi: 10.1111/ele.70059.
With many species interacting in nature, determining which interactions describe community dynamics is nontrivial. By applying a computational modeling approach to an extensive field survey, we assessed the importance of interactions from plants (both inter- and intra-specific), pollinators and insect herbivores on plant performance (i.e., viable seed production). We compared the inclusion of interaction effects as aggregate guild-level terms versus terms specific to taxonomic groups. We found that a continuum from positive to negative interactions, containing mostly guild-level effects and a few strong taxonomic-specific effects, was sufficient to describe plant performance. While interactions with herbivores and intraspecific plants varied from weakly negative to weakly positive, heterospecific plants mainly promoted competition and pollinators facilitated plants. The consistency of these empirical findings over 3 years suggests that including the guild-level effects and a few taxonomic-specific groups rather than all pairwise and high-order interactions, can be sufficient for accurately describing species variation in plant performance across natural communities.
在自然界中，许多物种相互作用，确定哪些相互作用描述群落动态并非易事。通过将计算建模方法应用于广泛的实地调查，我们评估了植物（种间和种内）、传粉者和昆虫食草动物之间的相互作用对植物表现（即可行种子产量）的重要性。我们比较了将相互作用效应作为总体功能群水平项与特定分类群项纳入模型的情况。我们发现，从正相互作用到负相互作用的连续统一体，其中主要包含功能群水平效应和一些强烈的分类群特异性效应，足以描述植物表现。虽然与食草动物和种内植物的相互作用从弱负到弱正有所不同，但异种植物主要促进竞争，传粉者则促进植物生长。这些实证结果在3年中的一致性表明，纳入功能群水平效应和一些分类群特异性群体，而不是所有成对和高阶相互作用，就足以准确描述自然群落中植物表现的物种变异。
