The Importance of Scaling for Detecting Community Patterns: Success and Failure in Assemblages of Introduced Species

Diversity

Craig R. Allen³  David G. Angeler²  Michael P. Moulton⁴  Crawford S. Holling¹ 

[1] Resilience Center, Vancouver Island, Nanaimo, BC V9R 5S5, Canada; E-Mail:;Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Aquatic Sciences and Assessment, Box 7050, SE-750 07 Uppsala, Sweden; E-Mail:;U.S. Geological Survey, Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, School of Natural Resources, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68583-0961, USA;Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA; E-Mail:

关键词: body size;    community assembly;    community structure;    competition;    Hawaii;    Introduced;    Oahu;   

DOI  :  10.3390/d7030229

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Community saturation can help to explain why biological invasions fail. However, previous research has documented inconsistent relationships between failed invasions (i.e., an invasive species colonizes but goes extinct) and the number of species present in the invaded community. We use data from bird communities of the Hawaiian island of Oahu, which supports a community of 38 successfully established introduced birds and where 37 species were introduced but went extinct (failed invasions). We develop a modified approach to evaluate the effects of community saturation on invasion failure. Our method accounts (1) for the number of species present (NSP) when the species goes extinct rather than during its introduction; and (2) scaling patterns in bird body mass distributions that accounts for the hierarchical organization of ecosystems and the fact that interaction strength amongst species varies with scale. We found that when using NSP at the time of extinction, NSP was higher for failed introductions as compared to successful introductions, supporting the idea that increasing species richness and putative community saturation mediate invasion resistance. Accounting for scale-specific patterns in body size distributions further improved the relationship between NSP and introduction failure. Results show that a better understanding of invasion outcomes can be obtained when scale-specific community structure is accounted for in the analysis.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.