Community assembly and invasion: An experimental test of neutral versus niche processes

A species-addition experiment showed that prairie grasslands have a structured, nonneutral assembly process in which resident species inhibit, via resource consumption, the establishment and growth of species with similar resource use patterns and in which the success of invaders decreases as diversity increases. In our experiment, species in each of four functional guilds were introduced, as seed, into 147 prairie-grassland plots that previously had been established and maintained to have different compositions and diversities. Established species most strongly inhibited introduced species from their own functional guild. Introduced species attained lower abundances when functionally similar species were…

• NS
  National Science Foundation

  Awards: 9629566, DEB-0080382, 0080382, DEB-9411972, 9411972
• AW
  Andrew W. Mellon Foundation