The editor’s choice for our August issue is ‘Fungi and deadwood diversity: A test of the area-heterogeneity trade-off hypothesis‘, by Max Zibold et al.:
Environmental heterogeneity is one of the most fundamental drivers of species diversity. For decades, ecologists have suggested that heterogeneity–diversity relationships are generally positive. But today, a greater variety of heterogeneity–diversity relationships is discussed.
In this study, the authors contrasted two hypotheses for wood-inhabiting fungi: The classical heterogeneity–diversity hypothesis, which predicts positive relationships due to an increase in niche dimensionality with increasing heterogeneity. And the more recently stated area-heterogeneity trade-off hypothesis, that predicts a unimodal pattern due to an inherent trade-off between the number of occupied niches and the effective area per species. It allows positive and negative relationships only as special cases.
In general, the results of this study suggest a unimodal heterogeneity–diversity relationship for deadwood-inhabiting fungi and are thereby in line with the area-heterogeneity trade-off hypothesis. Thus, the negative effect of heterogeneity should lead to lower species richness and a higher risk of stochastic extinctions at high levels of heterogeneity. However, as deadwood amount and deadwood diversity are often strongly correlated, the authors argue that the positive effect of resource availability on species richness may mask the negative effect of structural heterogeneity in some cases.
Read the full article online: Fungi and deadwood diversity: A test of the area-heterogeneity trade-off hypothesis
