PARENT SESSION
Monday, August 7, 8:00-11:30 am
COS 1 - Biodiversity I: environmental gradients and habitat factors, Part I
Ballroom A, Ballroom Level, Cook Convention Center
Presiders: D Cocking and H Pereira
Placing local plant species richness in the context of environmental drivers of metacommunity richness.
Stevens, M. Henry*,1, 1 Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA
ABSTRACT- Ecologists seem poised to reap the benefits of recent work examining the effects of energy and resources on plant taxonomic richness in local communities. I present a qualitative model that predicts local plant taxonomic richness based on previous work regarding (a) correlations between temperature, precipitation and richness, (b) correlations between soil nutrient availability and richness derived from both descriptions and experimental manipulations, and (c) empirical demonstrations of the importance of the species pool in regulating local species richness. The model consists of a phenomenlogical submodel of the multiplicative effects of temperature, water and mineral nutrients on plant species richness, with a spatially implicit submodel of immigration and extinction of species in local communities. The model makes the following five testable predictions. (i) Local richness increases linearly with immigration rate of new species and curvilinearly with local extinction rate. (ii) The effects of altered local immigration and extinction rates will be most apparent in local communities embedded in species-rich metacommunities. (iii) Local communities are not saturated, but rather increase in richness directly with increasing metacommunity richness. (iv) Unimodal or hump-shaped productivity-richness relations arise when low water or temperature limit diversity at low productivity and mineral nutrients limit diversity at high productivity. (v) An apparent scale-dependence of the effect productivity on richness should arise when there exists a matching scale-dependence of the underlying environmental drivers. These predictions do not contrast sharply with available data, but remain largely untested.
Key words: latitudinal biodiversity gradient, metacommunity, scale dependence