Reijenga, Bouwe Rutger;
(2023)
The macroecology of coexistence.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Ecological communities are assembled through ecological, environmental and historical processes. Ultimately, evolutionary historical processes, such as speciation and colonisation, are fundamental to assembly, as only speciation generates diversity. Despite history’s importance, it is frequently seen as stochastic and contrasts predictability. Here, I investigate this stochasticity and unpredictability. First, I investigate how the evolutionary history of allopatric speciation and colonisation time influences contemporary communities. I develop and fit a model of community assembly to passerine clades. The clade-specific history of speciation strongly impacts the build-up of sympatric diversity, and phylogenetic tree shape explains a significant proportion of variation in sympatric diversity. Assembly time is thus important, but is modified by ecological interactions and niche differentiation. Niche differentiation may facilitate sympatry, but when differentiation happens relative to secondary sympatry is unclear. I investigated whether niche differentiation happens before or after sympatry by studying the elevational differentiation of montane avian sister species. Utilising Markov models, I show that the processes occur at equal frequency, and emphasise that niche divergence events constrain the build-up of sympatric diversity. Lastly, evolutionary history and ecological interactions are integrated in a theoretical model. The model shows that stochasticity in species arrival order in communities can lead to unpredictable variation in local composition, but it does not impact the outcome of species diversification. This highlights that historical effects on one scale do not necessarily result in unpredictability on larger scales. Taken together, I show how combining phylogenies and process-based models can shed new light on how evolutionary history of lineages and interactions can shape community assembly. While history acts in various ways and over distinct scales, history is not always unpredictable. History has a much greater impact on present-day communities than appreciated, and a re-appraisal of how we view the consequences of history for community and macroecology is necessary.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | The macroecology of coexistence |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2023. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10164060 |
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