Interconnectedness of the Grinnellian and Eltonian Niche in Regional and Local Plant-Pollinator Communities

Overview

Journal Front Plant Sci

Date 2019 Nov 30

PMID 31781136

Citations 7

Authors

Robert R Junker

Martin H Lechleitner

Jonas Kuppler

Lisa-Maria Ohler

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Understanding the causes and consequences of coexistence and thus biodiversity is one of the most fundamental endeavors of ecology, which has been addressed by studying species' requirements and impacts - conceptualized as their Grinnellian and Eltonian niches. However, different niche types have been mostly studied in isolation and thus potential covariation between them remains unknown. Here we quantified the realized Grinnellian niche (environmental requirements), the fundamental (morphological phenotype) and realized Eltonian niche (role in networks) of plant and pollinator taxa at a local and regional scale to investigate the interconnectedness of these niche types. We found a strong and scale-independent co-variation of niche types suggesting that taxa specialized in environmental factors are also specialized in their position in trait spaces and their role in bipartite networks. The integration of niche types thus will help to detect the true causes for species distributions, interaction networks, as well as the taxonomic and functional diversity of communities.

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