@misc{10481/95543,
year = {2016},
month = {10},
url = {https://hdl.handle.net/10481/95543},
abstract = {Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes -operating
at separate timescales- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed
back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field experiment has explicitly shown
that communities of competing plant species can experience very fast phenotypic diversification,
and that this gives rise to enhanced complementarity in resource exploitation and to
enlarged ecosystem-level productivity. Here, we build on progress made in recent years in
the integration of eco-evolutionary dynamics, and present a computational approach aimed
at describing these empirical findings in detail. In particular we model a community of
organisms of different but similar species evolving in time through mechanisms of birth,
competition, sexual reproduction, descent with modification, and death. Based on simple
rules, this model provides a rationalization for the emergence of rapid phenotypic diversification
in species-rich communities. Furthermore, it also leads to non-trivial predictions
about long-term phenotypic change and ecological interactions. Our results illustrate that
the presence of highly specialized, non-competing species leads to very stable communities
and reveals that phenotypically equivalent species occupying the same niche may
emerge and coexist for very long times. Thus, the framework presented here provides a
simple approach -complementing existing theories, but specifically devised to account for
the specificities of the recent empirical findings for plant communities- to explain the collective
emergence of diversification at a community level, and paves the way to further scrutinize
the intimate entanglement of ecological and evolutionary processes, especially in
species-rich communities.},
organization = {Spanish
MINECO project FIS2013-43201-P and scholarship
FPU2012/05750},
organization = {Talentia Program (Junta de
Andalucía / EC-FP7 COFUND - Grant Agreement
267226)},
publisher = {Plos One},
title = {Eco-evolutionary Model of Rapid Phenotypic Diversification in Species-RichCommunities},
doi = {10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005139},
author = {Villa Martín, Paula and Hidalgo, Jorge and Rubio de Casas, Rafael Francisco and Muñoz Martínez, Miguel Ángel},
}