Abundance and dominance become less predictable as species richness decreases

Global Ecology and Biogeography

Volumn 20, Issue 6, 2011, Pages 832-841

  Dornelas, Maria ^a   Phillip, Dawn A ^b,c   Magurran, Anne E ^d  

^a JAMES COOK UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

^b UNIVERSITY OF AVEIRO   (Portugal)

^c UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST INDIES   (Trinidad and Tobago)

^d UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Aquatic biomass; Community structure; Dominant species; Energy use; Freshwater fish; Niche model; Resources; Species richness; Total abundance; Trinidad and Tobago

Indexed keywords

ABUNDANCE; ASSEMBLY RULE; BIODIVERSITY; BIOMASS; COMMUNITY STRUCTURE; CONTINENTAL SHELF; DOMINANCE; ECOLOGICAL MODELING; ENERGY USE; FISH; HYPOTHESIS TESTING; NICHE; PREDICTION; SPECIES RICHNESS;

DELTA AMACURO; ORINOCO DELTA; TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO; VENEZUELA;

EID: 80053652834     PISSN: 1466822X     EISSN: 14668238     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1466-8238.2010.00640.x     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. Apol, M.E.F., Etienne, R.S. & Olff, H. (2008) Revisiting the evolutionary origin of allometric metabolic scaling in biology. Functional Ecology, 22, 1070-1080.
2. Bazzaz, F.A. (1975) Plant species-diversity in old-field successional ecosystems in southern Illinois. Ecology, 56, 485-488.
3. Bhat, A. (2003) Diversity and composition of freshwater fishes in river systems of Central Western Ghats, India. Environmental Biology of Fishes, 68, 25-38.
4. Blackburn, T.M. & Gaston, K.J. (1996) A sideways look at patterns in species richness, or why there are so few species outside the tropics. Biodiversity Letters, 3, 44-53.
5. Brown, J.H. (1981) Two decades of homage to Santa-Rosalia - toward a general theory of diversity. American Zoologist, 21, 877-888.
6. Brown, J.H., Gillooly, J.F., Allen, A.P., Savage, V.M. & West, G.B. (2004a) Response to forum commentary on 'toward a metabolic theory of ecology'. Ecology, 85, 1818-1821.
7. Brown, J.H., Gillooly, J.F., Allen, A.P., Savage, V.M. & West, G.B. (2004b) Toward a metabolic theory of ecology. Ecology, 85, 1771-1789.
8. Cade, B.S. & Noon, B.R. (2003) A gentle introduction to quantile regression for ecologists. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 1, 412-420.
9. Chao, A., Colwell, R.K., Lin, C.W. & Gotelli, N.J. (2009) Sufficient sampling for asymptotic minimum species richness estimators. Ecology, 90, 1125-1133.
10. Chapin, F.S., III, Zavaleta, E.S., Eviner, V.T., Naylor, R.L., Vitousek, P.M., Reynolds, H.L., Hooper, D.U., Lavorel, S., Sala, O.E., Hobbie, S.E., Mack, M.C. & Díaz, S. (2000) Consequences of changing biodiversity. Nature, 405, 234-242.
11. Connolly, S.R. (2005) Process-based models of species distributions and the mid-domain effect. The American Naturalist, 166, 1-11.
12. Connolly, S.R., Hughes, T.P., Bellwood, D.R. & Karlson, R.H. (2005) Community structure of corals and reef fishes at multiple scales. Science, 309, 1363-1365.
13. Currie, D.J., Mittelbach, G.G., Cornell, H.V., Field, R., Guégan, J.-F., Hawkins, B.A., Kaufman, D.M., Kerr, J.T., Oberdorff, T., O'Brien, E. & Turner, J.R.G. (2004) Predictions and tests of climate-based hypotheses of broad-scale variation in taxonomic richness. Ecology Letters, 7, 1121-1134.
14. Engen, S. & Lande, R. (1996) Population dynamic models generating species abundance distributions of the gamma type. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 178, 325-331.
15. Fesl, C. (2002) Niche-oriented species-abundance models: different approaches of their application to larval chironomid (Diptera) assemblages in a large river. Journal of Animal Ecology, 71, 1085-1094.
16. Findley, J.S. & Findley, M.T. (2001) Global, regional, and local patterns in species richness and abundance of butterflyfishes. Ecological Monographs, 71, 69-91.
17. Gaston, K.J. & Fuller, R.A. (2008) Commonness, population depletion and conservation biology. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 23, 14-19.
18. Graham, N.A.J., Wilson, S.K., Jennings, S., Polunin, N.V.C., Bijoux, J.P. & Robinson, J. (2006) Dynamic fragility of oceanic coral reef ecosystems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 103, 8425-8429.
19. Hooper, D.U., Chapin, F.S., Ewel, J.J., Hector, A., Inchausti, P., Lavorel, S., Lawton, J.H., Lodge, D.M., Loreau, M., Naeem, S., Schmid, B., Setälä, H., Symstad, A.J., Vandermeer, J. & Wardle, D. (2005) Effects of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning: a consensus of current knowledge. Ecological Monographs, 75, 3-35.
20. Hubbell, S.P. (2001) The unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
21. Hughes, T.P., Bellwood, D.R., Folke, C., Steneck, R.S. & Wilson, J. (2005) New paradigms for supporting the resilience of marine ecosystems. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 20, 380-386.
22. Hurlbert, A.H. (2004) Species-energy relationships and habitat complexity in bird communities. Ecology Letters, 7, 714-720.
23. Huston, M.A. (1997) Hidden treatments in ecological experiments: re-evaluating the ecosystem function of biodiversity. Oecologia, 110, 449-460.
24. Kaspari, M., O'Donnell, S. & Kercher, J.R. (2000) Energy, density, and constraints to species richness: ant assemblages along a productivity gradient. The American Naturalist, 155, 280-293.
25. Kenny, J.S. (1995) Views from the bridge: a memoir on the freshwater fishes of Trinidad. Maracas, Trinidad and Tobago.
26. Kleiber, M. (1932) Body size and metabolism. Hilgardia, 6, 315-332.
27. Koenker, R. (2008) quantreg: quantile regression. R package Available at: (accessed March 2009).
28. Loreau, M., Naeem, S., Inchausti, P., Bengtsson, J., Grime, J.P., Hector, A., Hooper, D.U., Huston, M.A., Raffaelli, D., Schmid, B., Tilman, D. & Wardle, D. (2001) Ecology - biodiversity and ecosystem functioning: current knowledge and future challenges. Science, 294, 804-808.
29. MacArthur, R.H. (1955) Fluctuations of animal populations and a measure of community tability. Ecology, 36, 533-536.
30. MacArthur, R.H. (1960) On the relative abundance of species. The American Naturalist, 94, 25-34.
31. McCann, K.S. (2000) The diversity-stability debate. Nature, 405, 228-233.
32. McGill, B.J., Etienne, R.S., Gray, J.S., Alonso, D., Anderson, M.J., Benecha, H.K., Dornelas, M., Enquist, B.J., Green, J., He, F., Hurlbert, A., Magurram, A.E., Marquet, P.A., Maurer, B.A., Ostling, A., Soykan, C.U., Ugland, K. & White, E. (2007) Species abundance distributions: moving beyond single prediction theories to integration within an ecological framework. Ecology Letters, 10, 995-1015.
33. Magurran, A.E. (2004) Measuring biological diversity. Blackwell Science, Oxford.
34. Magurran, A.E. (2005) Evolutionary ecology: the Trinidadian guppy. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
35. Magurran, A.E. & Phillip, D.A. (2001) Implications of species loss in freshwater fish assemblages. Ecography, 24, 645-650.
36. May, R.M. (1973) Qualitative stability in model ecosystems. Ecology, 54, 638-641.
37. Mora, C., Chittaro, P.M., Sale, P.F., Kritzer, J.P. & Ludsin, S.A. (2003) Patterns and processes in reef fish diversity. Nature, 421, 933-936.
38. Morlon, H., White, E.P., Etienne, R.S., Green, J.L., Ostling, A., Alonso, D., Enquist, B.J., He, F.L., Hurlbert, A., Magurran, A.E., Maurer, B.A., McGill, B.J., Olff, H., Storch, D. & Zillio, T. (2009) Taking species abundance distributions beyond individuals. Ecology Letters, 12, 488-501.
39. Mouillot, D., George-Nascimento, M. & Poulin, R. (2003) How parasites divide resources: a test of the niche apportionment hypothesis. Journal of Animal Ecology, 72, 757-764.
40. Phillip, D.A. (1998) Biodiversity of freshwater fishes of Trinidad and Tobago, West Indies. PhD Thesis. University of St Andrews, St Andrews.
41. Pielou, E.C. (1975) Species abundance distributions. Ecological diversity, pp. 19-31. Wiley Interscience, New York.
42. Preston, F.W. (1948) The commonness, and rarity, of species. Ecology, 29, 254-283.
43. R Development Core Team (2006) R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.
44. Salafsky, N., Salzer, D., Stattersfield, A.J., Hilton-Taylor, C., Neugarten, R., Butchart, S.H.M., Collen, B., Cox, N., Master, L.L., O'Connor, S. & Wilkie, D. (2008) A standard lexicon for biodiversity conservation: unified classifications of threats and actions. Conservation Biology, 22, 897-911.
45. Southwood, T.R.E. & Henderson, P.A. (2000) Ecological methods, 3rd edn. Blackwell, Oxford.
46. Srivastava, D.S. & Lawton, J.H. (1998) Why more productive sites have more species: an experimental test of theory using tree-hole communities. The American Naturalist, 152, 510-529.
47. Stevens, M.H.H. & Carson, W.P. (1999) Plant density determines species richness along an experimental fertility gradient. Ecology, 80, 455-465.
48. Sugihara, G. (1980) Minimal community structure: an explanation of species abundance patterns. The American Naturalist, 116, 770-787.
49. Sugihara, G. (1989) How do species divide resources. The American Naturalist, 133, 458-463.
50. Tilman, D. & Downing, J.A. (1994) Biodiversity and stability in grasslands. Nature, 367, 363-365.
51. Tilman, D., Lehman, C.L. & Thomson, K.T. (1997) Plant diversity and ecosystem productivity: theoretical considerations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 94, 1857-1861.
52. Tilman, D., Reich, P.B., Knops, J., Wedin, D., Mielke, T. & Lehman, C. (2001) Diversity and productivity in a long-term grassland experiment. Science, 294, 843-845.
53. Tokeshi, M. (1990) Niche apportionment or random assortment: species abundance patterns revisited. Journal of Animal Ecology, 59, 1129-1146.
54. Tokeshi, M. & Schmid, P.E. (2002) Niche division and abundance: an evolutionary perspective. Population Ecology, 44, 189-200.
55. Weiher, E. & Keddy, P.A. (1999) Relative abundance and evenness patterns along diversity and biomass gradients. Oikos, 87, 355-361.
56. West, G.B., Brown, J.H. & Enquist, B.J. (1997) A general model for the origin of allometric scaling laws in biology. Science, 276, 122-126.
57. White, E., Ernest, S.K.M., Kerkhoff, A.J. & Enquist, B.J. (2007) Relationships between body size and abundance in ecology. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 22, 323-330.
58. White, E.P., Ernest, S.K.M. & Thibault, K.M. (2004) Trade-offs in community properties through time in a desert rodent community. The American Naturalist, 164, 670-676.
59. Whittaker, R.H. (1965) Dominance and diversity in land plant communities. Science, 147, 250-260.
60. Wright, D.H. (1983) Species-energy theory: an extension of species-area theory. Oikos, 41, 496-506.