Assembly and response rules: two goals for predictive community ecology

Assembly rules provide one possible unifying framework for community ecology. Given a species pool, and measured traits for each species, the objective is to specify which traits (and therefore which subset of species) will occur in a particular environment. Because the problem primarily involves tr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of vegetation science 1992-04, Vol.3 (2), p.157-164
Main Author: Keddy, Paul A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
ANIMAL ECOLOGY
Biological taxonomies
COMMUNAUTE VEGETALE
Community ecology
COMUNIDADES VEGETALES
ECOLOGIA ANIMAL
ECOLOGIA VEGETAL
Ecological competition
Ecological genetics
ECOLOGIE ANIMALE
Fire
Flooding
FORECASTING
Functional groups
Island
MODELE
MODELOS
Natural selection
PHYTOECOLOGIE
PLANT COMMUNITIES
PLANT ECOLOGY
Plants
Population ecology
Prediction
Special Feature: Biological Traits, Environmental Factors, and Plant Community Organization
Species
Species pool
Synecology
TECHNIQUE DE PREVISION
TECNICAS DE PREDICCION
Trait
Vegetation
Wetland ecology
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Summary:Assembly rules provide one possible unifying framework for community ecology. Given a species pool, and measured traits for each species, the objective is to specify which traits (and therefore which subset of species) will occur in a particular environment. Because the problem primarily involves traits and environments, answers should be generalizable to systems with very different taxonomic composition. In this context, the environment functions like a filter (or sieve) removing all species lacking specified combinations of traits. In this way, assembly rules are a community level analogue of natural selection. Response rules follow a similar process except that they transform a vector of species abundances to a new vector using the same information. Examples already exist from a range of habitats, scales, and kinds of organisms.
ISSN:1100-9233
1654-1103
DOI:10.2307/3235676