Plant and animal functional diversity drive mutualistic network assembly across an elevational gradient
- Species’ functional traits set the blueprint for pair-wise interactions in ecological networks. Yet, it is unknown to what extent the functional diversity of plant and animal communities controls network assembly along environmental gradients in real-world ecosystems. Here we address this question with a unique dataset of mutualistic bird–fruit, bird–flower and insect–flower interaction networks and associated functional traits of 200 plant and 282 animal species sampled along broad climate and land-use gradients on Mt. Kilimanjaro. We show that plant functional diversity is mainly limited by precipitation, while animal functional diversity is primarily limited by temperature. Furthermore, shifts in plant and animal functional diversity along the elevational gradient control the niche breadth and partitioning of the respective other trophic level. These findings reveal that climatic constraints on the functional diversity of either plants or animals determine the relative importance of bottom-up and top-down control in plant–animal interaction networks.
Author: | Jörg AlbrechtORCiDGND, Alice Classen, Maximilian Vollstädt, Antonia Mayr, Neduvoto Piniel Mollel, David Schellenberger Costa, Hamadi Iddi Dulle, Markus Fischer, Andreas HempORCiDGND, Kim M. Howell, Michael Kleyer, Thomas NaussORCiDGND, Marcell K. Peters, Marco Tschapka, Ingolf Steffan-Dewenter, Katrin Böhning-GaeseORCiDGND, Matthias SchleuningORCiDGND |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-486815 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-05610-w |
ISSN: | 2041-1723 |
Pubmed Id: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30093613 |
Parent Title (English): | Nature Communications |
Publisher: | Nature Publishing Group UK |
Place of publication: | [London] |
Document Type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Year of Completion: | 2018 |
Date of first Publication: | 2018/08/09 |
Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
Release Date: | 2019/01/17 |
Tag: | Community ecology; Ecological networks; Ecology; Ecosystem ecology |
Volume: | 9 |
Issue: | 1, Art. 3177 |
Page Number: | 10 |
First Page: | 1 |
Last Page: | 10 |
Note: | Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
HeBIS-PPN: | 446229563 |
Institutes: | Angeschlossene und kooperierende Institutionen / Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft |
Biowissenschaften / Institut für Ökologie, Evolution und Diversität | |
Fachübergreifende Einrichtungen / Biodiversität und Klima Forschungszentrum (BiK-F) | |
Dewey Decimal Classification: | 5 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik / 58 Pflanzen (Botanik) / 580 Pflanzen (Botanik) |
Sammlungen: | Universitätspublikationen |
Licence (German): | Creative Commons - Namensnennung 4.0 |