Affiliation:
1. Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies University of Zurich Zurich Switzerland
2. Department of Fish Ecology and Evolution Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology Kastanienbaum Switzerland
Abstract
AbstractThe scaling exponent relating the mean and variance of the density of individual organisms in space (i.e., Taylor's slope: zspace) is well studied in ecology, but the analogous scaling exponent for temporal datasets (ztime) is underdeveloped. Previous theory suggests the narrow distribution of ztime (e.g., typically 1–2) could be due to interspecific competition. Here, using 1694 communities time series, we show that ztime can exceed 2, and reaffirm how this can affect our inference about the stabilizing effect of biodiversity. We also develop a new theory, based on temporal change in the ranks of species abundances, to help account for the observed ztime distribution. Specifically, we find that communities with minimal turnover in species' rank abundances are more likely to have higher ztime. Our analysis shows how species‐level variability affects our inference about the stability of ecological communities.
Funder
Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology
Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung
Universität Zürich
Cited by
1 articles.
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