The geographic scaling of biotic interactions
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Abstract
A central tenet of ecology and biogeography is that the broad outlines of species ranges are determined by climate, whereas the effects of biotic interactions are manifested at local scales. While the first proposition is supported by ample evidence, the second is still a matter of controversy. To address this question, we develop a mathematical model that predicts the spatial overlap, i.e., co-occurrence, between pairs of species subject to all possible types of interactions. We then identify the scale in which predicted range overlaps are lost. We found that co-occurrence arising from positive interactions, such as mutualism (+/+) and commensalism (+/0), are manifested across scales of resolution. Negative interactions, such as competition (-/-) and amensalism (-/0), generate checkerboard-type co-occurrence patterns that are discernible at finer resolutions. Scale dependence in consumer-resource interactions (+/-) depends on the strength of positive dependencies between species. Our results challenge the widely held view that climate alone is sufficient to characterize species distributions at broad scales, but also demonstrate that the spatial signature of competition is unlikely to be discernible beyond local and regional scales.
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2013. The geographic scaling of biotic interactions. PeerJ PrePrints 1:e82v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.82v1note This preprint is not peer-reviewed. You may wish to reference the subsequent peer-reviewed version of this article.
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Competing Interests
The authors declare there are no competing interests.
Author Contributions
Miguel B Araújo conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper.
Alejandro Rozenfeld conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools.
Funding
MBA acknowledges the Integrated Program of IC&DT Call No 1/SAESCTN/ALENT-07-0224-FEDER-001755, and the Danish NSF for support of his research. AR is funded through a Portuguese FCT post-doctoral fellowship (SFRH/BPD/ 75133/2010). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
