The more the merrier: Multi-species experiments in ecology
By M. van Kleunen, Wayne Dawson, Oliver Bossdorf, Markus Fischer. 2014
90 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A major objective in ecology is to find general patterns, and to establish the rules and underlying mechanisms that generate those patterns. Nevertheless, most of our current insights in ecology are based on case studies of a single or few species, whereas multi-species experimental studies remain rare. We underline the power of the multi-species experimental approach for addressing general ecological questions, e. g. on species environmental responses or on patterns of among-and within-species variation. We present simulations that show that the accuracy of estimates of between-group differences is increased by maximizing the number of species rather than the number of populations or individuals per species. Thus, the more species a multi-species experiment includes, the more powerful it is. In addition, we discuss some inevitable methodological challenges of multi-species experiments. While we acknowledge the value of single-or few-species experiments, we strongly advocate the use of multi-species experiments for addressing ecological questions at a more general level.
Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/70ad0e90612bb7cd0aa3085de73cb3daa4a263db
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In Ecological Modeling
In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
In Nature and Landscape Conservation
Citations in the corpus
- Responses of common and rare aliens and natives to nutrient availability and fluctuations (2017, methodology): “To increase the statistical power for detecting differences among the four groups of studied species, we had maximized the number of species per group over the number of replicate pots per species (van Kleunen et al. 2014).”
- Assisted migration within species range ignores biotic interactions and lacks evidence (2017, background): “We need large-scale experiments comparing the performance of climate-adapted and regional ecotypes under experimental or ongoing climate change across many species and life-history types (van Kleunen et al. 2014).”