Plant ecology's guilty little secret: understanding the dynamics of plant competition
Plant ecology's guilty little secret: understanding the dynamics of plant competition
复制标题
DOI：
10.1111/1365-2435.12078
复制
发表时间：
2013-08
影响因子：
5.2
通讯作者：
Clare J. Trinder;R. Brooker;D. Robinson
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Clare J. Trinder;R. Brooker;D. Robinson
摘要 植物竞争的研究已经有几十年了。然而，它仍然是一个难以捉摸的概念，对不同的人来说意味着不同的事情，难以直接研究，并且被语义和统计的复杂性所笼罩。我们仍然缺乏关于许多竞争机制、过程和结果及其与其他生态过程的关系的基本信息，以及关于个体之间的局部相互作用如何通过社区传播的基本信息。我们在此建议，先前的研究忽略了两个关键问题。首先，需要对竞争过程进行直接衡量，而不是对竞争结果进行间接衡量。生物质已成为衡量竞争的“行业标准”，但我们认为生物质不能为植物竞争提供明确的见解，因为它是太多因素和过程的产物。其次，在实验的任意指定终点使用单一竞争衡量标准会忽略竞争植物之间动态相互作用的大部分复杂性，并可能导致错误的解释。在这里，我们提出了解决这些困难的方法，即使用新技术或以新颖的方式应用众所周知的方法。我们还提供了系统或问题的示例，在这些示例中，加深对这些方法的理解将带来特别的好处。最终，我们建议需要对考虑和衡量植物竞争的方式进行重大转变，以确定其重要性、其在不同群落和栖息地中的作用，以及其如何以及是否影响或驱动物种多样性和丰度模式的变化的广泛认可的规则。
Summary Plant competition has been studied for decades. Yet, it is still an elusive concept that means different things to different people, is resistant to direct study and is shrouded in semantic and statistical complexity. We still lack basic information about many competitive mechanisms, processes and outcomes and their relationship to other ecological processes, and about how local interactions between individuals are propagated through communities. We suggest here that two critical issues have been overlooked in previous studies. First, there is a need for direct measurements of the process of competition as opposed to indirect mechanisms of competitive outcomes. Biomass has become the ‘industry standard’ for measuring competition, but we suggest that biomass cannot provide unambiguous insights into plant competition because it is the product of too great a range of factors and processes. Second, the use of a single measure of competition at an arbitrarily assigned end point of an experiment misses much of the complexity of dynamic interactions between competing plants and can lead to erroneous interpretations. Here, we suggest approaches to handle these difficulties, using new techniques or the application of well-known methods in a novel way. We also provide examples of systems or questions where the improved understanding these approaches could bring would be of particular benefit. Ultimately, we suggest the need for a major shift in the way in which we consider and measure plant competition to identify broadly agreed rules for variation in its importance, its role in different communities and habitats, and how and whether it influences or drives patterns of species diversity and abundance.