Dynamics of coupled mutualistic and antagonistic interactions, and their implications for ecosystem management.

Understanding the interplay of antagonistic and mutualistic interactions is an important challenge for predicting the fate of ecological communities. So far, studies of propagation of disturbances have focused on a single interaction type (antagonistic or mutualistic), leaving out part of the natural diversity. We develop a model that describes the dynamics of a plant species interacting with one antagonistic (e.g. an herbivore) and one mutualistic (e.g. a pollinator) species confronted to a perturbation to assess how each interaction type will affect the other. We analyze the effect of additional mortality as a press perturbation acting on the plant's partners. We study how the intensity of the disturbance and the relative sensitivities of partner species determine community structure, as well as extinction orders. We show that due to indirect effects between the two types of interactions, additional mortality on both pollinators and herbivores can either decrease or increase their densities. The presence of pollinators can stabilize the antagonistic interaction by preventing cyclic dynamics in the plant-herbivore system. We propose explanatory mechanisms based on indirect effects and discuss the implications of our results for the conservation of interactions and communities. Our results suggest that, in agricultural landscapes, direct effects of insecticides on herbivore densities can be fully offset by indirect effects mediated through pollinators. The loss of pollinators, due to insecticide use, can also destabilize the dynamics of insect herbivores.

Plant preference for ammonium versus nitrate: a neglected determinant of ecosystem functioning?

Although nitrogen (N) availability is a major determinant of ecosystem properties, little is known about the ecological importance of plants' preference for ammonium versus nitrate (ß) for ecosystem functioning and the structure of communities. We modeled this preference for two contrasting ecosystems and showed that ß significantly affects ecosystem properties such as biomass, productivity, and N losses. A particular intermediate value of ß maximizes the primary productivity and minimizes mineral N losses. In addition, contrasting ß values between two plant types allow their coexistence, and the ability of one type to control nitrification modifies the patterns of coexistence with the other. We also show that species replacement dynamics do not lead to the minimization of the total mineral N pool nor the maximization of plant productivity, and consequently do not respect Tilman's R* rule. Our results strongly suggest in the two contrasted ecosystems that ß has important consequences for ecosystem functioning and plant community structure.

Evolution of nutrient acquisition: when adaptation fills the gap between contrasting ecological theories.

Although plant strategies for acquiring nutrients have been widely studied from a functional point of view, their evolution is still not well understood. In this study, we investigate the evolutionary dynamics of these strategies and determine how they influence ecosystem properties. To do so, we use a simple nutrient-limited ecosystem model in which plant ability to take up nutrients is subject to adaptive dynamics. We postulate the existence of a trade-off between this ability and mortality. We show that contrasting strategies are possible as evolutionary outcomes, depending on the shape of the trade-off and, when nitrogen is considered as the limiting nutrient, on the intensity of symbiotic fixation. Our model enables us to bridge these evolutionary outcomes to classical ecological theories such as Hardin's tragedy of the commons and Tilman's rule of R*. Evolution does not systematically maximize plant biomass or primary productivity. On the other hand, each evolutionary outcome leads to a decrease in the availability of the limiting mineral nutrient, supporting the work of Tilman on competition between plants for a single resource. Our model shows that evolution can be used to link different classical ecological results and that adaptation may influence ecosystem properties in contrasted ways.

Ecological consequences of evolution in plant defenses in a metacommunity.

Dispersal can affect the assembly of local communities in a metacommunity as well as evolution of local populations in a metapopulation. These two processes may also affect each other in ways that have not yet been well studied and that may have novel effects on community structure. Here, we illustrate the interaction of these two processes on community structure with a model of adaptive evolutionary dynamics of plant defenses in a metacommunity food web involving multiple patches along a productivity gradient. We find an enhanced suite of adaptive plant types in our metacommunity model than is predicted in the absence of dispersal. We also find that this, and the movement of nutrients among patches via dispersal, alters patterns of food web architecture, trophic structure and diversity along the productivity gradient. Overall, our model illustrates that evolutionary and metacommunity dynamics may influence communities in complex interactive ways that may not be predicted by models that ignore either of these types of processes.