Equivalence and dissimilarity of ecosystem states

Boit, Alice and Spencer, M (2019) Equivalence and dissimilarity of ecosystem states. Ecological Modelling, 396. pp. 12-22.

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Abstract

Measuring (dis)similarity between ecosystem states is a key theme in ecology. Much of community and ecosystem ecology is devoted to searching for patterns in ecosystem similarity from an external observer's viewpoint, using variables such as species abundances, measures of diversity and complexity. However, from the point of view of organisms in the ecosystem, proportional population growth rates are the only relevant aspect of ecosystem state, because natural selection acts on groups of organisms with different proportional population growth rates. We therefore argue that two ecosystem states are equivalent if and only if, for each species they contain, the proportional population growth rate does not differ between the states. Based on this result, we develop species-level and aggregated summary measures of ecosystem state and discuss their ecological meaning. We illustrate our approach using a long-term dataset on the plankton community from the Central European Lake Constance. We show that the first three principal components of proportional population growth rates describe most of the variation in ecosystem state in Lake Constance. We strongly recommend using proportional population growth rates and the derived equivalence classes for comparative ecosystem studies. This opens up new perspectives on important existing topics such as alternative stable ecosystem states, community assembly, and the processes generating regularities in ecosystems.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Hutchinson niche, Ecosystem dynamics, Ecosystem dissimilarity, Proportional population growth rate, Per capita growth rate
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	15 Jan 2019 09:49
Last Modified:	19 Jan 2023 01:06
DOI:	10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2019.01.009
Open Access URL:	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2019.01.009
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3031281