Review of factors affecting patterns and processes of community assembly

Hirao Toshihide, Murakami Masashi, Onoyama Keiichi

doi:10.18960/seitai.55.1_29

Community assembly is one of the major themes in community ecology. For a decade, ecologists have been searching for general principles that govern the patterns and processes of community assembly. In the context of community assembly, a hierarchy is understood to exist between local and meta-communities. There are two major approaches for studying community assembly. First, species diversity is highlighted in those communities. Second, a search is made for an ordered community structure itself. In this paper, we review the literature on community assembly to clarify the factors affecting its patterns and processes. Five principal determinants-species pool constraints, dispersal constraints, environmental constraints, internal constraints and stochastic constraints-are listed, and the emerging patterns observed in the community assembly are examined. A series of community assembly processes then follow. Initially, a regional species pool is constructed under the influence of evolutionary and biogeographic events. When species migrate into focal sites from the regional species pool, the immigration sequence that is influenced by dispersal rate, habitat connectivity and stochasticity substantially affects the local assembly. Species that arrive at the focal sites are environmentally filtered by factors such as productivity, disturbance and environmental heterogeneity. Species in the local species pool are potential members of the local and meta-community. Local and meta-community patterns emerge when members of the local species pool are subject to internal dynamics, or assembly rules, although some pattern can also emerge from external factors alone. Falling apart, or disassembly, of a community through breakdown of species interactions follows these processes. The operation of assembly and disassembly processes may be largely cyclic. In a series of these assembly processes, constraints affecting community assembly patterns interact with each other. The spatio-temporal scale is a potential determinant of the observed patterns. Interaction of these constraints and the spatio-temporal scale may be research frontiers in future studies of community assembly.

Review of factors affecting patterns and processes of community assembly

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