Diversity peaks at intermediate productivity in a laboratory microcosm

Rees Kassen (), Angus Buckling, Graham Bell and Paul B. Rainey
Additional contact information
Rees Kassen: McGill University
Angus Buckling: University of Oxford
Graham Bell: McGill University
Paul B. Rainey: University of Oxford

Nature, 2000, vol. 406, issue 6795, 508-512

Abstract: Abstract The species diversity of natural communities is often strongly related to their productivity. The pattern of this relationship seems to vary: diversity is known to increase monotonically with productivity, to decrease monotonically with productivity, and to be unimodally related to productivity, with maximum diversity occurring at intermediate levels of productivity1,2,3. The mechanism underlying these patterns remains obscure, although many possibilities have been suggested3,4,5,6. Here we outline a simple mechanism—involving selection in a heterogeneous environment—to explain these patterns, and test it using laboratory cultures of the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens . We grew diverse cultures over a wide range of nutrient concentrations, and found a strongly unimodal relationship between diversity and productivity in heterogeneous, but not in homogeneous, environments. Our result provides experimental evidence that the unimodal relationship often observed in natural communities can be caused by selection for specialized types in a heterogeneous environment.

Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/35020060 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:406:y:2000:i:6795:d:10.1038_35020060

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/35020060

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().