JAPANESE JOURNAL OF ECOLOGY
Online ISSN : 2424-127X
Print ISSN : 0021-5007
ISSN-L : 0021-5007
Suzuki Award
The mechanisms of maintenance of biodiversity in patchy environments
Kohmei Kadowaki
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JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS

2016 Volume 66 Issue 1 Pages 1-23

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Abstract

Improved understanding of the mechanisms that drive the generation, maintenance, and loss of species diversity is among the primary objectives of ecology. The niche- partitioning concept provided an early explanation for species coexistence and diversity. A growing body of theoretical research has demonstrated that dynamic processes operating across a range of (i) biological levels of organization (individuals, species, and communities) and (ii) spatio-temporal scales create the “niches” that permit species coexistence in structured environments. These theoretical considerations require corroboration through empirical experimentation, but practical logistical difficulties often restrict experiments to limited scales of space and time that are much smaller than those embodied in theoretical simulations. In this review, I argue that natural microcosms can be used to resolve this issue by incorporating spatial heterogeneity, spatio-temporal scaling and dispersal in patchy environments. Using case studies with different types of natural microcosms ([i] carrion flies on rats, [ii] spore-feeding beetles on bracket fungi, and [iii] protozoans in pitcher plant leaves), I identified three key mechanisms driving species diversity: probabilistic spatial aggregation, competition-colonization dynamics, and assembly-history dynamics; I also reviewed associated schematic models to test the putative mechanisms. My analyses demonstrated that natural microcosm experiments were able to reveal the linkages between the maintenance of species diversity, spatio-temporal scaling and environmental heterogeneity in natural systems.

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© 2016 The Ecological Society of Japan
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