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Submitted on June 15, 2006
Accepted on August 31, 2006
From Plant Traits to Plant Communities: A Statistical Mechanistic Approach to Biodiversity
Bill Shipley 1*, Denis Vile 2, Éric Garnier 3
1 Département de Biologie, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke (Qc) J1K 2R1, Canada. 2 Département de Biologie, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke (Qc) J1K 2R1, Canada; Centre d'Écologie Fonctionnelle et Évolutive, CNRS, UMR 5175, 1919 Route de Mende, 34293 Montpellier Cedex 5, France. 3 Centre d'Écologie Fonctionnelle et Évolutive, CNRS, UMR 5175, 1919 Route de Mende, 34293 Montpellier Cedex 5, France.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Bill Shipley , E-mail: Bill.Shipley{at}USherbrooke.ca
We develop a quantitative method, analogous to those used instatistical mechanics, to predict how biodiversity will varyacross environments, which plant species from a species poolwill be found in which relative abundances in a given environment,and which plant traits determine community assembly. This providesa scaling from plant traits to ecological communities whilebypassing the complications of population dynamics. Communitydevelopment is treated as a sorting process involving speciesthat are ecologically equivalent except with respect to particularfunctional traits, leading to a constrained random assemblyof species, the relative abundance of each following a generalexponential distribution as a function of its traits. Usingdata on 8 functional traits of 30 herbaceous species, and community-aggregatedvalues of these traits in 12 sites along a 42-year chronosequenceof secondary succession, we predict 94% of the variance in therelative abundances.
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