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After drought, ponds keep up with the Joneses
Date:10/15/2007

or two species of plant make it through, including one annual plant that makes lots of seeds, so when the pond refills again, its ready to flourish.

Go elsewhere, or die

These tough species are incumbents, which gives them an advantage when the ponds refill. They can rebuff some of the new colonists. Niches get filled in the pond and colonists trying to join the club either go elsewhere or die.

Drought homogenizes the variance among communities, Chase said. It takes all these communities that used to be very different from each other and makes them very similar to each other. Thats a very much underappreciated part of biodiversity.

Chases research was published in the Oct. 15 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The National Science Foundation funds his work.

Chases findings are important to the study of biodiversity because he analyzed ponds both locally and regionally. A local analysis measures alpha diversity, which is the analysis of all the species in one pond. Chase, on the other hand, measured beta diversity, which measures the difference among ponds. If before the drought each pond had 10 species but only shared five in common, that difference is beta diversity.

I found drought had less than a 10 percent reduction on local diversity, but a nearly 50 percent reduction on regional diversity. This is important because if you just count the number of species in any given pond you might say that drought had little effect on species diversity. But if you take exact data and you ask: Did drought affect regional diversity" I found it had a huge effect on regional diversity.

Most diversity studies only have looked at local communities, which in many cases rebound very quickly following disturbances. Thus, ecologists trying to restore wetlands, prairies, or forests, could get the impression that all is needed is to build it and they will come. But Chases findin
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Contact: Tony Fitzpatrick
tony_fitzpatrick@wustl.edu
314-935-5272
Washington University in St. Louis
Source:Eurekalert

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