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Title [sv]
Varför monopoliserar vissa arter biologiska samhällen?
Title [en]
Community dominance - what makes a successful monopolizer?
Abstract [en]
A central question in ecology is what determines biodiversity and its patterns over time and space. A fairly little studied aspect of community assembly in natural communities is the importance of historical factors such as priority effects, i.e. that species arriving early to a certain environment has a competitive advantage over later arrivals because of monopolization of the resources. Especially unstudied are the mechanisms making a successful monopolizer. It is commonly assumed that good monopolizers can rapidly adapt to local environmental conditions, for instance because of great functional plasticity and functional niche width. Recent findings, however, suggest that bacterial monopolizers are such with extremely small genomes, i.e. possessing a small functional repertoire. Therefore it is here hypothesized that the key trait of a successful bacterial monopolizer is not adaptability but rather traits such as grazing resistance and low requirement for phosphorus, at least in environments of relatively low environmental heterogeneity. Modern DNA sequencing techniques in combination with statistical tools will be used to identify monopolizers in lake bacterial communities and to determine their genome sizes. Experimental studies will be used to test the relative importance of different traits for priority effects and monopolization. Due to the small sizes and short generation times of bacteria experimental studies can be conducted over small temporal and spatial scales, and therefore they are suitable models in research regarding patterns in biodiversity and community assembly in general. Further natural bacterial communities are little studied in the context of monopolization and such studies may answer the question of why bacterial communities and biogeography are so little influenced by dispersal despite that they disperse so well. The project is intended as a back bone for a PhD thesis and will, thus, be conducted during a period of four years.
Principal InvestigatorLindström, Eva
Coordinating organisation
Uppsala University
Funder
Period
2016-01-01 － 2019-12-31
National Category
Ecology
Identifiers
DiVA, id: project:5759Project, id: 2015-04931_VR

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