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Community assembly in temperate forest birds: habitat filtering, interspecific interactions and priority effects

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Abstract

Recent attempts to understand the processes governing community assembly have increasingly focused on patterns of phylogenetic relatedness and functional similarity among co-existing species. Considerations of the species pool, the number and identity of functional traits and the metrics used to identify patterns have come under scrutiny as possible influences on the detection of non-random patterns. Most mechanistic explanations of community assembly based on functional and phylogenetic approaches rely on deterministic explanations, while ignoring the role of stochastic processes and historical contingency, despite the prominent historical role of both types of explanations of species coexistence. We evaluated the phylogenetic and functional structure of 20 temperate forest bird assemblages in northeastern North America. We compared three approaches for characterizing the functional structure of assemblages. Regardless of approach, assemblages were generally no different than expected by chance. In contrast, phylogenetic structures of bird assemblages were overdispersed, clumped or consistent with random assembly depending on the site. Nonetheless, we found little evidence for differences in phylogenetic structure arising as a consequence of the identity of the species pool. We identified a strong relationship between the proportion of residents and phylogenetic relatedness that was unrelated to the species richness of assemblages. Our results suggest that different assembly mechanisms may structure resident and migratory subsets of temperate breeding bird communities. Resident assemblages are likely structured by interspecific interactions and habitat filtering prior to arrival of migrants. In contrast, the composition of migrant assemblages may be a consequence of priority effects in which the presence and abundance of residents and earliest arriving species affect the ability of subsequent migrants to colonize sites. This phenomenon enhances the likelihood of multiple alternative community structures in similar environments.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Office of the Vice President for research (MRW), an IBA Small Grants Program Award from Audubon Connecticut (M.R.W., B.T.K., and S. Presley) and multiple intramural awards to B.T.K. [Center for Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Connecticut Museum of Natural History at the University of Connecticut]. Partial funding for the synthetic portion of the project was provided by a National Science Foundation grant to S. Andelman and J. Parrish entitled “The Dimensions of Biodiversity Distributed Graduate Seminar” (DEB-1050680). We thank S. Adamson, R. Hall, J. Lech, and C. Roberts for assistance with acoustic libraries and fieldwork and S.J. Presley, the associate editor, and two anonymous reviewers for comments that improved the content and exposition of the manuscript.

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  1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Center for Environmental Sciences and Engineering, University of Connecticut, 75 N. Eagleville Road, Unit 3043, Storrs, CT, 06269-3043, USA

    Brian T. Klingbeil & Michael R. Willig

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Correspondence to Brian T. Klingbeil.

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Klingbeil, B.T., Willig, M.R. Community assembly in temperate forest birds: habitat filtering, interspecific interactions and priority effects. Evol Ecol 30, 703–722 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10682-016-9834-7

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