Correction: Persistence of Neighborhood Demographic Influences over Long Phylogenetic Distances May Help Drive Post-Speciation Adaptation in Tropical Forests.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Wills C
PROVIDER: S-EPMC5173372 | biostudies-literature | 2016
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Correction: Persistence of Neighborhood Demographic Influences over Long Phylogenetic Distances May Help Drive Post-Speciation Adaptation in Tropical Forests.
Wills Christopher C Harms Kyle E KE Wiegand Thorsten T Punchi-Manage Ruwan R Gilbert Gregory S GS Erickson David D Kress W John WJ Hubbell Stephen P SP Gunatilleke C V Savitri CV Gunatilleke I A U Nimal IA
PloS one 20161220 12
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0156913.]. ...[more]
Similar Datasets
Project description:Studies of forest dynamics plots (FDPs) have revealed a variety of negative density-dependent (NDD) demographic interactions, especially among conspecific trees. These interactions can affect growth rate, recruitment and mortality, and they play a central role in the maintenance of species diversity in these complex ecosystems. Here we use an equal area annulus (EAA) point-pattern method to comprehensively analyze data from two tropical FDPs, Barro Colorado Island in Panama and Sinharaja in Sri Lanka. We show that these NDD interactions also influence the continued evolutionary diversification of even distantly related tree species in these FDPs. We examine the details of a wide range of these interactions between individual trees and the trees that surround them. All these interactions, and their cumulative effects, are strongest among conspecific focal and surrounding tree species in both FDPs. They diminish in magnitude with increasing phylogenetic distance between heterospecific focal and surrounding trees, but do not disappear or change the pattern of their dependence on size, density, frequency or physical distance even among the most distantly related trees. The phylogenetic persistence of all these effects provides evidence that interactions between tree species that share an ecosystem may continue to promote adaptive divergence even after the species' gene pools have become separated. Adaptive divergence among taxa would operate in stark contrast to an alternative possibility that has previously been suggested, that distantly related species with dispersal-limited distributions and confronted with unpredictable neighbors will tend to converge on common strategies of resource use. In addition, we have also uncovered a positive density-dependent effect: growth rates of large trees are boosted in the presence of a smaller basal area of surrounding trees. We also show that many of the NDD interactions switch sign rapidly as focal trees grow in size, and that their cumulative effect can strongly influence the distributions and species composition of the trees that surround the focal trees during the focal trees' lifetimes.
| S-EPMC4909291 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundPlasmodium vivax is a widely distributed, neglected parasite that can cause malaria and death in tropical areas. It is associated with an estimated 80-300 million cases of malaria worldwide. Brazilian tropical rain forests encompass host- and vector-rich communities, in which two hypothetical mechanisms could play a role in the dynamics of malaria transmission. The first mechanism is the dilution effect caused by presence of wild warm-blooded animals, which can act as dead-end hosts to Plasmodium parasites. The second is diffuse mosquito vector competition, in which vector and non-vector mosquito species compete for blood feeding upon a defensive host. Considering that the World Health Organization Malaria Eradication Research Agenda calls for novel strategies to eliminate malaria transmission locally, we used mathematical modeling to assess those two mechanisms in a pristine tropical rain forest, where the primary vector is present but malaria is absent.Methodology/principal findingsThe Ross-Macdonald model and a biodiversity-oriented model were parameterized using newly collected data and data from the literature. The basic reproduction number ([Formula: see text]) estimated employing Ross-Macdonald model indicated that malaria cases occur in the study location. However, no malaria cases have been reported since 1980. In contrast, the biodiversity-oriented model corroborated the absence of malaria transmission. In addition, the diffuse competition mechanism was negatively correlated with the risk of malaria transmission, which suggests a protective effect provided by the forest ecosystem. There is a non-linear, unimodal correlation between the mechanism of dead-end transmission of parasites and the risk of malaria transmission, suggesting a protective effect only under certain circumstances (e.g., a high abundance of wild warm-blooded animals).Conclusions/significanceTo achieve biological conservation and to eliminate Plasmodium parasites in human populations, the World Health Organization Malaria Eradication Research Agenda should take biodiversity issues into consideration.
| S-EPMC3605282 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Species richness is greatest in the tropics, and much of this diversity is concentrated in mountains. Janzen proposed that reduced seasonal temperature variation selects for narrower thermal tolerances and limited dispersal along tropical elevation gradients [Janzen DH (1967) Am Nat 101:233-249]. These locally adapted traits should, in turn, promote reproductive isolation and higher speciation rates in tropical mountains compared with temperate ones. Here, we show that tropical and temperate montane stream insects have diverged in thermal tolerance and dispersal capacity, two key traits that are drivers of isolation in montane populations. Tropical species in each of three insect clades have markedly narrower thermal tolerances and lower dispersal than temperate species, resulting in significantly greater population divergence, higher cryptic diversity, higher tropical speciation rates, and greater accumulation of species over time. Our study also indicates that tropical montane species, with narrower thermal tolerance and reduced dispersal ability, will be especially vulnerable to rapid climate change.
| S-EPMC6298121 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Tropical ecosystems adapted to high water availability may be highly impacted by climatic changes that increase soil and atmospheric moisture deficits. Many tropical regions are experiencing significant changes in climatic conditions, which may induce strong shifts in taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity of forest communities. However, it remains unclear if and to what extent tropical forests are shifting in these facets of diversity along climatic gradients in response to climate change. Here, we show that changes in climate affected all three facets of diversity in West Africa in recent decades. Taxonomic and functional diversity increased in wetter forests but tended to decrease in forests with drier climate. Phylogenetic diversity showed a large decrease along a wet-dry climatic gradient. Notably, we find that all three facets of diversity tended to be higher in wetter forests. Drier forests showed functional, taxonomic and phylogenetic homogenization. Understanding how different facets of diversity respond to a changing environment across climatic gradients is essential for effective long-term conservation of tropical forest ecosystems.
| S-EPMC7335099 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Analysis of the structure, diversity, and demographic dynamics of tree assemblages in tropical forests is especially important in order to evaluate local and regional successional trajectories.We conducted a long-term study to investigate how the structure, species richness, and diversity of secondary tropical forests change over time. Trees (DBH ? 5 cm) in the Atlantic Forest of southern Brazil were sampled twice during a 10-year period (2007 and 2017) in six stands (1 ha each) that varied in age from their last disturbance (25, 60, 75, 90, and more than 100 years). We compared forest structure (abundance and basal area), species richness, alpha diversity, demographic rates (mortality, recruitment, and loss or gain in basal area), species composition, spatial beta diversity, and temporal beta diversity (based on turnover and nestedness indices) among stand ages and study years.Demographic rates recorded in a 10-year interval indicate a rapid and dynamic process of species substitution and structural changes. Structural recovery occurred faster than beta diversity and species composition recovery. The successional gradient showed a pattern of species trade-off over time, with less spatial dissimilarity and faster demographic rates in younger stands. As stands grow older, they show larger spatial turnover of species than younger stands, making them more stochastic in relation to species composition. Stands appear to split chronologically to some extent, but not across a straightforward linear axis, reflecting stochastic changes, providing evidence for the formation of a nonequilibrium community. Policy implications. These results reiterate the complexity and variability in forest succession and serve as a reference for the evaluation and monitoring of local management and conservation actions and for defining regional strategies that consider the diversity of local successional trajectories to evaluate the effectiveness of restoration measures in secondary forests of the Atlantic Forest biome.
| S-EPMC7141045 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The high biodiversity in tropical seas provides a long-standing challenge to allopatric speciation models. Physical barriers are few in the ocean and larval dispersal is often extensive, a combination that should reduce opportunities for speciation. Yet coral reefs are among the most species-rich habitats in the world, indicating evolutionary processes beyond conventional allopatry. In a survey of mtDNA sequences of five congeneric west Atlantic reef fishes (wrasses, genus Halichoeres) with similar dispersal potential, we observed phylogeographical patterns that contradict expectations of geographical isolation, and instead indicate a role for ecological speciation. In Halichoeres bivittatus and the species pair Halichoeres radiatus/brasiliensis, we observed strong partitions (3.4% and 2.3% divergence, respectively) between adjacent and ecologically distinct habitats, but high genetic connectivity between similar habitats separated by thousands of kilometres. This habitat partitioning is maintained even at a local scale where H. bivittatus lineages are segregated between cold- and warm-water habitats in both Bermuda and Florida. The concordance of evolutionary partitions with habitat types, rather than conventional biogeographical barriers, indicates parapatric ecological speciation, in which adaptation to alternative environmental conditions in adjacent locations overwhelms the homogenizing effect of dispersal. This mechanism can explain the long-standing enigma of high biodiversity in coral reef faunas.
| S-EPMC1564072 | biostudies-literature
Project description:When estimating a phylogeny from a multiple sequence alignment, researchers often assume the absence of recombination. However, if recombination is present, then tree estimation and all downstream analyses will be impacted, because different segments of the sequence alignment support different phylogenies. Similarly, convergent selective pressures at the molecular level can also lead to phylogenetic tree incongruence across the sequence alignment. Current methods for detection of phylogenetic incongruence are not equipped to distinguish between these two different mechanisms and assume that the incongruence is a result of recombination or other horizontal transfer of genetic information. We propose a new recombination detection method that can make this distinction, based on synonymous codon substitution distances. Although some power is lost by discarding the information contained in the nonsynonymous substitutions, our new method has lower false positive probabilities than the comparable recombination detection method when the phylogenetic incongruence signal is due to convergent evolution. We apply our method to three empirical examples, where we analyze: (1) sequences from a transmission network of the human immunodeficiency virus, (2) tlpB gene sequences from a geographically diverse set of 38 Helicobacter pylori strains, and (3) hepatitis C virus sequences sampled longitudinally from one patient.
| S-EPMC4521982 | biostudies-literature
Project description:We present 2 distinct and independent approaches to deduce the effective interaction strengths between species and apply it to the 20 most abundant species in the long-term 50-ha plot on Barro Colorado Island, Panama. The first approach employs the principle of maximum entropy, and the second uses a stochastic birth-death model. Both approaches yield very similar answers and show that the collective effects of the pairwise interspecific interaction strengths are weak compared with the intraspecific interactions. Our approaches can be applied to other ecological communities in steady state to evaluate the extent to which interactions need to be incorporated into theoretical explanations for their structure and dynamics.
| S-EPMC2728984 | biostudies-literature
Project description:[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0168211.].
| S-EPMC5383340 | biostudies-literature
Project description:A persistent challenge in ecology is to explain the high diversity of tree species in tropical forests. Although the role of species characteristics in maintaining tree diversity in tropical forests has been the subject of theory and debate for decades, spatial patterns in local diversity have not been analyzed from the viewpoint of individual species. To measure scale-dependent local diversity structures around individual species, we propose individual species-area relationships (ISAR), a spatial statistic that marries common species-area relationships with Ripley's K to measure the expected alpha diversity in circular neighborhoods with variable radius around an arbitrary individual of a target species. We use ISAR to investigate if and at which spatial scales individual species increase in tropical forests' local diversity (accumulators), decrease local diversity (repellers), or behave neutrally. Our analyses of data from Barro Colorado Island (Panama) and Sinharaja (Sri Lanka) reveal that individual species leave identifiable signatures on spatial diversity, but only on small spatial scales. Most species showed neutral behavior outside neighborhoods of 20 m. At short scales (<20 m), we observed, depending on the forest type, two strongly different roles of species: diversity repellers dominated at Barro Colorado Island and accumulators at Sinharaja. Nevertheless, we find that the two tropical forests lacked any key species structuring species diversity at larger scales, suggesting that "balanced" species-species interactions may be a characteristic of these species-rich forests. We anticipate our analysis method will be a starting point for more powerful investigations of spatial structures in diversity to promote a better understanding of biodiversity in tropical forests.
| S-EPMC2141902 | biostudies-other