Section: Ecology
Topic: Ecology, Population biology, Statistics

Beyond variance: simple random distributions are not a good proxy for intraspecific variability in systems with environmental structure

Corresponding author(s): Girard-Tercieux, Camille (camillegirardtercieux@gmail.com)

10.24072/pcjournal.360 - Peer Community Journal, Volume 4 (2024), article no. e28.

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The role of intraspecific variability (IV) in shaping community dynamics and species coexistence has been intensively discussed over the past decade and modelling studies have played an important role in that respect. However, these studies often implicitly assume that IV can be represented by independent random draws around species-specific mean parameters. This major assumption has largely remained undiscussed, although a great part of observed IV is structured in space or time, in particular when environmental dimensions that influence individual performance are imperfectly characterised or unobserved in the field. To test the impact of this strong assumption on the outcome of community dynamics models, we designed a simulation experiment where we varied the level of knowledge of the environment in virtual communities, resulting in different relative importance of explained vs unexplained spatial individual variation in performance. We used a community dynamics simulator to generate communities where the unexplained individual variation is, or is not, added as an unstructured random noise. Communities simulated with unstructured IV never reached the community diversity and composition of those where all the variation was explained and structured (perfect knowledge model). This highlights that incorporating unstructured IV (i.e. a random noise) to account for unexplained (but structured) variation can lead to incorrect simulations of community dynamics. In addition, the effects of unstructured IV on community diversity and composition depended on the relative importance of structured vs unstructured IV, i.e. on the level of knowledge of the environment, which may partly explain the contrasting results of previous studies on the effect of IV on species coexistence. In particular, the effect of unstructured IV on community diversity was positive when the proportion of structured IV vs unstructured IV in the model was low, but negative when this proportion was high. This is because unstructured random noise can either limit the competitive exclusion of inferior competitors in low dimensions or destabilise tight niche partitioning in high dimension. Our study suggests that it is crucial to account for the sources and structure of observed IV in real communities to better understand its effect on community assembly and properly include it in community dynamics models.

Published online:
DOI: 10.24072/pcjournal.360
Type: Research article

Girard-Tercieux, Camille 1; Vieilledent, Ghislain 1; Clark, Adam 2; Clark, James S. 3, 4; Courbaud, Benoit 4; Fortunel, Claire 1; Kunstler, Georges 4; Pélissier, Raphaël 1; Rüger, Nadja 5, 6, 7; Maréchaux, Isabelle 1

1 AMAP, Université de Montpellier, CIRAD, CNRS, INRAE, IRD, Montpellier, France
2 Institute of Biology, Karl-Franzens University of Graz, Graz, Austria
3 Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Durham (NC), USA
4 Université Grenoble Alpes, INRAE, LESSEM, St. Martin-d’Heres, France
5 Department of Economics, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany
6 German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany
7 Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Balboa, Ancón, Panama
License: CC-BY 4.0
Copyrights: The authors retain unrestricted copyrights and publishing rights
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     title = {Beyond variance: simple random distributions are not a good proxy for intraspecific variability in systems with environmental structure},
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Girard-Tercieux, Camille; Vieilledent, Ghislain; Clark, Adam; Clark, James S.; Courbaud, Benoit; Fortunel, Claire; Kunstler, Georges; Pélissier, Raphaël; Rüger, Nadja; Maréchaux, Isabelle. Beyond variance: simple random distributions are not a good proxy for intraspecific variability in systems with environmental structure. Peer Community Journal, Volume 4 (2024), article  no. e28. doi : 10.24072/pcjournal.360. https://peercommunityjournal.org/articles/10.24072/pcjournal.360/

PCI peer reviews and recommendation, and links to data, scripts, code and supplementary information: 10.24072/pci.ecology.100466

Conflict of interest of the recommender and peer reviewers:
The recommender in charge of the evaluation of the article and the reviewers declared that they have no conflict of interest (as defined in the code of conduct of PCI) with the authors or with the content of the article.

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