Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Selection and biodiversity change

  • ORIGINAL PAPER
  • Published:
Theoretical Ecology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

There is a great need to understand how and why biodiversity, which we define as the variety of organisms found in a given place, changes over time. Current estimates suggest strikingly slow change in traditional measures of biodiversity. These estimates seem to contradict rapid shifts in the abundance of individual species and have led to a rethinking of the mechanisms shaping biodiversity. Conceptual models emphasise the role of competition among species or, more recently, selection on species identity (i.e. selection that favours some species at the expense of others). However, it is difficult to quantify how these mechanisms contribute to biodiversity change. To illustrate this point, we present cases where strong competition or selection on species identity leads to no biodiversity change. In view of this disconnect, we develop a new approach to studying biodiversity change using the Price equation. We show that biodiversity change responds to selection on species’ rarity, rather than to either competition or selection on species identity. We then show how this insight can be used to quantify the effects of the mechanisms previously thought to influence biodiversity: (1) selection, (2) (ecological) drift, (3) immigration and (4) speciation. Our results suggest the connection between species’ fates and their rarity is fundamental to understanding biodiversity change.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Abrams PA (1987) On classifying interactions between populations. Oecologia 73:272–281

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Adler PB, HilleRisLambers J, Levine JM (2007) A niche for neutrality. Ecology Letters 10:95–104

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Ayala FJ, Campbell CA (1974) Frequency-dependent selection. Annual review of Ecology and systematics 5:115–138

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Barton NH, Servedio M (2015) The interpretation of selection coefficients. Evolution 69:1101–1112

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Blanchet FG, Cazelles K, Gravel D (2020) Co-occurrence is not evidence of ecological interactions. Ecology Letters

  • Chase JM, Knight TM (2013) Scale-dependent effect sizes of ecological drivers on biodiversity: why standardised sampling is not enough. Ecology letters 16:17–26

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Chase JM, Leibold MA (2003) Ecological niches—linking classical and contemporary approaches. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Collins S, Gardner A (2009) Integrating physiological, ecological and evolutionary change: a Price equation approach. Ecol Lett 12:744–757

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Conner JK, Hartl DL (2004) A primer of ecological genetics. Sinauer Associates Incorporated,

  • Cover TM, Thomas JA (2012) Elements of information theory. John Wiley & Sons,

  • Day T (2005) Modelling the ecological context of evolutionary change: deja vu or something new? In: Ecological paradigms lost: routes of theory change. Elsevier, p 273

  • Dornelas M, Gotelli NJ, McGill B, Shimadzu H, Moyes F, Sievers C, Magurran AE (2014) Assemblage time series reveal biodiversity change but not systematic loss. Science 344:296–299

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Engen S, Sæther BE (2014) Evolution in fluctuating environments: decomposing selection into additive components of the Robertson–Price equation. Evolution 68:854–865

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Frank SA (2012a) Natural selection. III. Selection versus transmission and the levels of selection. Journal of evolutionary biology 25:227–243

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Frank SA (2012b) Natural selection. IV. The Price equation. Journal of evolutionary biology 25:1002–1019

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Frank SA (2012c) Natural selection. V. How to read the fundamental equations of evolutionary change in terms of information theory. Journal of evolutionary biology 25:2377–2396

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Genung MA, Schweitzer JA, Ubeda F, Fitzpatrick BM, Pregitzer CC, Felker-Quinn E, Bailey JK (2011) Genetic variation and community change—selection, evolution, and feedbacks. Funct Ecol 25:408–419

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Govaert L, Pantel JH, De Meester L (2016) Eco-evolutionary partitioning metrics: assessing the importance of ecological and evolutionary contributions to population and community change. Ecology letters 19:839–853

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Hedrick PW (2011) Genetics of populations. Jones & Bartlett Learning,

  • Hill MO (1973) Diversity and evenness: a unifying notation and its consequences. Ecology 54:427–432

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hillebrand H et al (2018) Biodiversity change is uncoupled from species richness trends: consequences for conservation and monitoring. Journal of applied ecology 55:169–184

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hubbell SP (2001) A unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography. Princeton University Press, Princeton

    Google Scholar 

  • Jablonski D (2008) Species selection: theory and data. Annu Rev Ecol Evol Syst 39:501–524

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jia X, Dini-Andreote F, Salles JF (2018) Community assembly processes of the microbial rare biosphere. Trends in microbiology 26:738–747

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Johnson MTJ, Stinchcombe JR (2007) An emerging synthesis between community ecology and evolutionary biology. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 22:250–257

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Jost L (2006) Entropy and diversity. Oikos 113:363–375

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jost L (2007) Partitioning diversity into independent alpha and beta components. Ecology 88:2427–2439

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Kahn_Academy_Labs (2014) Information entropy | Journey into information theory | Kahn Academy

  • Kerr B, Godfrey-Smith P (2009) Generalization of the Price equation for evolutionary change. Evolution 63:531–536

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Lande R (1979) Quantitative genetic analysis of multivariate evolution, applied to brain: body size allometry. Evolution 33:402–416

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Lande R, Arnold SJ (1983) The measurement of selection on correlated characters. Evolution 37:1210–1226

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Lehtonen J (2018) The Price equation, gradient dynamics, and continuous trait game theory. The American Naturalist 191:146–153

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Loreau M, Hector A (2001) Partitioning selection and complementarity in biodiversity experiments. Nature 412:72–76

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Luís R, Elaydi S, Oliveira H (2011) Stability of a Ricker-type competition model and the competitive exclusion principle. Journal of Biological Dynamics 5:636–660

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • MacArthur R (1970) Species packing and competitive equilibrium for many species. Theor Popul Biol 1:1–11

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • MacArthur RH (1972) Geographical ecology: patterns in the distribution of species. Harper & Row, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • MacDonald A, Vellend M (2016) R code for chapter 6: simulating dynamics in ecological communities. Accessed 11 November 2017

  • Magurran AE (2013) Measuring biological diversity. John Wiley & Sons,

  • Mallet J (2012) The struggle for existence: how the notion of carrying capacity, K, obscures the links between demography, Darwinian evolution, and speciation. Evolutionary Ecology Research 14:627–665

    Google Scholar 

  • McGill BJ, Dornelas M, Gotelli NJ, Magurran AE (2015) Fifteen forms of biodiversity trend in the Anthropocene. Trends in ecology & evolution 30:104–113

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Morales-Ventura J, Nandini S, Sarma SS, Castellanos-Páez ME (2012) Demography of zooplankton (Anuraeopsis fissa, Brachionus rubens and Moina macrocopa) fed Chlorella vulgaris and Scenedesmus acutus cultured on different media. Rev Biol Trop 60(3):955–65. https://doi.org/10.15517/rbt.v60i3.1750

  • Norberg J, Urban MC, Vellend M, Klausmeier CA, Loeuille N (2012) Eco-evolutionary responses of biodiversity to climate change. Nature Climate Change 2:747–751

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nowak MA (2006) Evolutionary dynamics. Harvard University Press,

  • Otto SP, Day T (2007) A biologist's guide to mathematical modeling in ecology and evolution vol 13. Princeton University Press,

  • Patil G, Taillie C (1982) Diversity as a concept and its measurement. Journal of the American statistical Association 77:548–561

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Perring MP, de Frenne P, Baeten L, Maes SL, Depauw L, Blondeel H, Carón MM, Verheyen K (2016) Global environmental change effects on ecosystems: the importance of land-use legacies. Glob Chang Biol 22:1361–1371

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Price GR (1970) Selection and covariance. Nature 227:520–521

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Price GR (1972) Extension of covariance selection mathematics. Ann Hum Genet 35:485–490

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Price GR (1995) The nature of selection. J Theor Biol 175:389–396

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Purves DW, Turnbull LA (2010) Different but equal: the implausible assumption at the heart of neutral theory. Journal of Animal Ecology 79:1215–1225

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Queller DC (2017) Fundamental theorems of evolution. The American Naturalist 189:345–353

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • R Core Team (2019) R: a language and environment for statistical computing

  • Rabosky DL, McCune AR (2010) Reinventing species selection with molecular phylogenies. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 25:68–74

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rankin BD et al. (2015) The extended Price equation quantifies species selection on mammalian body size across the Palaeocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum. Proc R Soc B 282:20151097

  • Remus-Emsermann MN, Pelludat C, Gisler P, Drissner D (2018) Conjugation dynamics of self-transmissible and mobilisable plasmids into E. coli O157:H7 on Arabidopsis thaliana rosettes. bioRxiv doi:https://doi.org/10.1101/375402

  • Rice SH (2004) Evolutionary theory: mathematical and conceptual foundations. Sinauer Associates Sunderland,

  • Ricker WE (1954) Stock and recruitment. Journal of the Fisheries Board of Canada 11:559–623

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rosindell J, Hubbell SP, Etienne RS (2011) The unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography at age ten. Trends in ecology & evolution 26:340–348

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rosindell J, Hubbell SP, He F, Harmon LJ, Etienne RS (2012) The case for ecological neutral theory. Trends in ecology & evolution 27:203–208

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shannon CE (1948) A mathematical theory of communication. Bell system technical journal 27:379–423

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sherwin WB, Chao A, Jost L, Smouse PE (2017) Information theory broadens the spectrum of molecular ecology and evolution. Trends in ecology & evolution 32:948–963

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Sirianni K (2018) Connecting zooplankton populations in time and space: how dispersal, biotic, and abiotic factors influence metapopulation dynamics

  • Tilman D (1980) A graphical-mechanistic approach to competition and predation. Am Nat 116:362–393

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tilman D, Wedin D (1991) Dynamics of nitrogen competition between successional grasses. Ecology 72:1038–1049

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tittensor DP et al (2014) A mid-term analysis of progress toward international biodiversity targets. Science 346:241–244

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Traulsen A, Nowak MA (2006) Evolution of cooperation by multilevel selection. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103:10952–10955

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Vellend M (2010) Conceptual synthesis in community ecology. Q Rev Biol 85:183–206

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Vellend M (2016) The theory of ecological communities (MPB-57). Princeton University Press

  • Vellend M et al. (2017) Plant biodiversity change across scales during the Anthropocene. Annual Review of Plant Biology 68

  • Vellend M et al (2013) Global meta-analysis reveals no net change in local-scale plant biodiversity over time. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110:19456–19459

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

Mark Westoby, Thuy Nguyen, and Buck Trible, the other participants in our discussion group, whose thoughts shaped the current article. We are particularly indebted to Margaret Kosmala for creating and organising these discussions. Our paper would not have been possible without her effort. This manuscript has received thoughtful comments from several previous reviewers, and we are indebted to their work. In particular, we recognise Jeremy Fox, who reviewed the manuscript several times, along with James Rosindell and an anonymous reviewer who reviewed the text during an extremely stressful time. Helpful comments were provided by Mark Vellend, Steve Frank, Komei Kadowaki, Erol Ackay, Adrian Paterson, Bevin Brett and Robert Cruickshank. Images of rabbit and squirrel based on illustrations by Anthony Caravaggi (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/). All illustrations from phylopic (http://phylopic.org/).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. BioProtection Research Centre, Lincoln University, Lincoln, New Zealand

    William Godsoe

  2. Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Katherine E. Eisen

  3. Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, MN, USA

    Daniel Stanton

  4. eCornell, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14850, USA

    Katherine M. Sirianni

Authors
  1. William Godsoe
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Katherine E. Eisen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Daniel Stanton
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Katherine M. Sirianni
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to William Godsoe.

Electronic supplementary material

ESM 1

(DOCX 19 kb)

ESM 2

(RMD 14 kb)

ESM 3

(R 17 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Godsoe, W., Eisen, K.E., Stanton, D. et al. Selection and biodiversity change. Theor Ecol 14, 367–379 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12080-020-00478-3

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12080-020-00478-3

Keywords

Search

Navigation