Emergence of community structure in terrestrial mammal-dominated ecosystems

Abstract

We present a paper that combines empirical and theoretical research about the trophic organization of biological communities. Some regularities are observed in the analysis of the relationship between the trophic structure (how the species are distributed among a set of feeding groups) of a number of African large mammal communities and the type of ecosystem. Different types of ecosystems are characterized by specific patterns in the trophic structure of the mammal community. In order to explain the origin of these patterns, we propose a model defining the underlying dynamic of mammal-dominated ecosystems. The main aim of this study is to show that it is possible to obtain a dynamic explanation of those patterns. The model is shown to spontaneously define different types of structures in community organization, related to those observed. We propose a model that could help to explain the correlation between different environmental factors and the abundance or diversity of herbivores, and which establishes a general mechanism that makes it possible to understand how some rules constrain the assembly of the communities. In addition, the proposed model leads us to see how biological communities can operate in an integrated way, which allows for the acceptance of their changes on large time-scales as evolutionary. In summary, we suggest that communities are unitary structures with coherent properties that result from the self-organizing dynamic of the whole system.