Linking Keystone Species and Functional Groups: A New Operational Definition of the Keystone Species Concept

By R. Davic. 2003

150 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The concept of the "keystone species" is redefined to allow for the a priori prediction of these species within ecosystems. A keystone species is held to be a strongly interacting species whose top-down effect on species diversity and competition is large relative to its biomass dominance within a functional group. This operational definition links the community importance of keystone species to a specific ecosystem process, e.g., the regulation of species diversity, within functional groups at lower trophic levels that are structured by competition for a limited resource. The a priori prediction of keystone species has applied value for the conservation of natural areas.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9d049a83ec3e49d95981a3e2ad700e30d798f868

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

In Plant Science

Citations in the corpus

How to monitor ecological communities cost-efficiently: The example of plant–pollinator networks (2010, background): “The possibility to target functionally important species for conservation efforts is important since it may enable us to preserve ecological functioning (e.g., Davic, 2003).”
The Implications of Niche Construction and Ecosystem Engineering for Conservation Biology (2006, background): “An increasing number of biologists view niche construction as an important evolutionary process (Day et al. 2003), and acknowledge that each generation of organisms inherits both genes and a legacy of modified selection pressures from the ancestral generation.”
A method for identifying keystone species in food web models (2006, background): “Another important result is that keystone species do not always exert their high impact by means of top-down effects, a feature initially suggested to be a defining characteristic of keystone species (Paine, 1969), and thus proposed for identifying keystones (Davic, 2003).”
Ecological impact of beavers Castor fiber and Castor canadensis and their ability to modify ecosystems (2005, background): “the biomass-dominant species, of their occupied functional groups (see Fox & Brown, 1993 and Bellwood & Hughes, 2001 for a definition of functional group), they could also be considered as a candidate keystone species (Davic, 2003).”
Ecological roles of crayfish in freshwater and terrestrial habitats (2013, background): “Crayfish that influence multiple trophic levels are “keystone” species — organisms that dominate energy flow and thus or otherwise affect ecosystem structure or function (Paine 1969; Davic 2003).”
Keystone species: toward an operational concept for marine biodiversity conservation (2015, background): “…proposed indices were based either on observations from the field (e.g., interaction strength [Paine 1992] or community importance [Mills et al. 1993, Power et al. 1996]), or on theoretical concepts (e.g., general functional importance [Hurlbert 1997] or functional group dominance [Davic 2003]).”
Scaling up keystone effects from simple to complex ecological networks (2005, background): “…influence the magnitude of a classic keystone effect that involves the facilitation of competitively subordinate basal species (Sn) through keystone (K) consumption of the competitive dominant (D) (Paine 1969; Morin 1983; Brown & Heske 1990; Grover 1994; Power et al. 1996; Davic 2003).”