Resisting annihilation: relationships between functional trait dissimilarity, assemblage competitive power and allelopathy

Abstract Allelopathic species can alter biodiversity. Using simulated assemblages that are characterised by neutrality, lumpy coexistence and intransitivity, we explore relationships between within-assemblage competitive dissimilarities and resistance to allelopathic species. An emergent behaviour from our models is that assemblages are more resistant to allelopathy when members strongly compete exploitatively (high competitive power). We found that neutral assemblages were the most vulnerable to allelopathic species, followed by lumpy and then by intransitive assemblages. We find support for our modeling in real-world time-series data from eight lakes of varied morphometry and trophic state. Our analysis of this data shows that a lake's history of allelopathic phytoplankton species biovolume density and dominance is related to the number of species clusters occurring in the plankton assemblages of those lakes, an emergent trend similar to that of our modeling. We suggest that an assemblage's competitive power determines its allelopathy resistance

for Dryad - Lake Fancsika2

time series data for Lake Fancsika2, Hungar

for Dryad - Lake Fancsika1

time series data for Lake Fancsika1, Hungar

Assemblage_HAB_resistance_func

This is the function called by the main program

for Dryad - Lake Constance

time series data for Lake Constance, German

Assemblage_HAB_resistance

This is the master program (Matlab) that is used to determine an assemblages sensitivity to allelopath

for Dryad - Lake Koronia

This is the time-series phytoplankton data for Lake Koronia, Greec

for Dryad - Lake Mezeshegyi

time series data for Lake Mezeshegyi, Hungar

for Dryad - Lake Mikri Prespa

This is the time-series phytoplankton data for Lake Mikri Prespa, Greec

for Dryad - Lake Volvi

This is the time-series phytoplankton data for Lake Volvi, Greec