期刊
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
卷 107, 期 9, 页码 4242-4247出版社
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0911637107
关键词
species coexistence; habitat partitioning; competition-colonization tradeoff; stress tolerance; seed mass
资金
- HSBC Climate Partnership
- Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering
- University of Minnesota
- National Science Foundation [DEB 614055, 0453445]
- Direct For Biological Sciences
- Division Of Environmental Biology [0453445] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Seed size commonly varies by five to six orders of magnitude among coexisting plant species, a pattern ecologists have long sought to explain. Because seed size trades off with seed number, small-seeded species clearly have the advantage in fecundity, but what is the countervailing advantage of large seeds? Higher competitive ability combined with strong competitive asymmetry can in theory allow coexistence through a competition-colonization trade-off, but empirical evidence is inconsistent with this mechanism. Instead, the key advantage of large seeds appears to be their tolerance of stresses such as shade or drought that are present in some but not all regeneration sites. Here I present a simple, analytically tractable model of species coexistence in heterogeneous habitats through a tolerance-fecundity trade-off. Under this mechanism, the more tolerant species win all of the more stressful regeneration sites and some of those that are less stressful, whereas the more fecund species win most but not all of the less stressful sites. The tolerance-fecundity trade-off enables stable coexistence of large numbers of species in models with and without seed limitation. The tolerance-fecundity mechanism provides an excellent explanation for the maintenance of diversity of seed size within plant communities and also suggests new hypotheses for coexistence in animal and microbial communities.
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