Affiliations 

  • 1 Division of Biological Sciences, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, United States of America
  • 2 Guangxi Key Laboratory of Plant Conservation and Restoration Ecology in Karst Terrain, Guangxi Institute of Botany, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guilin
  • 3 Key Laboratory of Forest Ecology and Management, Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang
  • 4 College of Chemistry and Life Sciences, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua
  • 5 College of Life Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou
  • 6 Department of Wildland Resources, Utah State University, Logan, Utah, United States of America
  • 7 Center for Ecology & Hydrology, Penicuik, Midlothian, Scotland
  • 8 Department of Biological Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Los Angeles, United States of America
  • 9 Divecha Centre for Climate Change, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India
  • 10 Center for Integrative Conservation, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Menglun, Mengla, Yunnan
  • 11 Zhejiang Tiantong Forest Ecosystem National Observation and Research Station, School of Ecological and Environmental Sciences, East China Normal University, Shanghai
  • 12 Department of Biology, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Newfoundland, Canada
  • 13 Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, National Taiwan University, Taipei
  • 14 School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
  • 15 Department of Ecology, State Key Laboratory of Biocontrol and School of Life Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou
  • 16 Department of Botany and Plant Physiology, University of Buea, Cameroon
  • 17 Department of Biological Sciences, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung
  • 18 National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, India
  • 19 Center for Tropical Forest Science, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, United States of America
  • 20 Faculty of Science and Technology, Uva Wellassa University, Badulla, Sri Lanka
  • 21 Department of Botany, University of Peradeniya, Peradeniya Sri Lanka
  • 22 Forest Research Institute Malaysia, Kepong Selangor, Malaysia
  • 23 Dept. of Botany, Faculty of Science, University of Peradeniya, Peradeniya Sri Lanka
  • 24 Taiwan Forestry Research Institute, Taipei
  • 25 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States of America
  • 26 Graduate School of Science, Osaka City University, Sumiyoshi Ku, Osaka, Japan
  • 27 Center for Tropical Forest Science-Forest Global Earth Observatory (CTFS-ForestGEO), Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, NMNH-MRC, Washington, DC, United States of America
  • 28 State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 20 Nanxincun, Xiangshan, Beijing
  • 29 Natural England Mail Hub, County Hall, Worcester, United Kingdom
  • 30 School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford University Centre for the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
  • 31 Institute of Biology, College of Science, University of the Philippines Diliman, Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines
  • 32 Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Studies, National Dong Hwa University, Hualien
  • 33 Forest Department Sarawak, Bangunan Wisma Sumber Alam, Jalan Stadium, Petra Jaya, Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia
  • 34 Department of Biology, Washington State University, Vancouver, Washington State, United States of America
  • 35 Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology, Columbia University, New York city, New York, United States of America
  • 36 Dept of Environmental Sciences, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, San Juan, PR, United States of America
PLoS Comput Biol, 2021 Apr;17(4):e1008853.
PMID: 33914731 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008853

Abstract

When Darwin visited the Galapagos archipelago, he observed that, in spite of the islands' physical similarity, members of species that had dispersed to them recently were beginning to diverge from each other. He postulated that these divergences must have resulted primarily from interactions with sets of other species that had also diverged across these otherwise similar islands. By extrapolation, if Darwin is correct, such complex interactions must be driving species divergences across all ecosystems. However, many current general ecological theories that predict observed distributions of species in ecosystems do not take the details of between-species interactions into account. Here we quantify, in sixteen forest diversity plots (FDPs) worldwide, highly significant negative density-dependent (NDD) components of both conspecific and heterospecific between-tree interactions that affect the trees' distributions, growth, recruitment, and mortality. These interactions decline smoothly in significance with increasing physical distance between trees. They also tend to decline in significance with increasing phylogenetic distance between the trees, but each FDP exhibits its own unique pattern of exceptions to this overall decline. Unique patterns of between-species interactions in ecosystems, of the general type that Darwin postulated, are likely to have contributed to the exceptions. We test the power of our null-model method by using a deliberately modified data set, and show that the method easily identifies the modifications. We examine how some of the exceptions, at the Wind River (USA) FDP, reveal new details of a known allelopathic effect of one of the Wind River gymnosperm species. Finally, we explore how similar analyses can be used to investigate details of many types of interactions in these complex ecosystems, and can provide clues to the evolution of these interactions.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.