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Towards a heuristic understanding of the storage effect
Evan C Johnson1,2, Alan Hastings1
1Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California Davis, Davis, California, USA.
Ecology Letters
|October 1, 2022
Summary
The storage effect explains species coexistence in changing environments. This study clarifies its conditions, revealing it
Area of Science:
- Ecology
- Evolutionary Biology
Background:
- The storage effect is a key ecological theory explaining species coexistence in variable environments.
- Its generality makes a simple, intuitive, and correct interpretation challenging.
- Understanding the storage effect is crucial for predicting biodiversity dynamics.
Purpose of the Study:
- To explicate the storage effect by refining its core conditions.
- To provide a more intuitive and accurate framework for understanding species coexistence.
- To identify novel mechanisms contributing to the temporal storage effect.
Main Methods:
- Deconstructing the covariance between environment and competition into causal relationship strength and environmental change rate.
- Analyzing how these refined conditions explain existing ecological observations.
- Proposing new mechanisms for the temporal storage effect.
Main Results:
- The storage effect requires a strong causal link between environment and competition, and slow environmental change.
- This refined definition explains why germination rate fluctuations promote coexistence, but seed yield fluctuations do not.
- It also clarifies why resource competition is a stronger inducer than apparent competition and why stage structure or environmental autocorrelation facilitate the storage effect.
Conclusions:
- The storage effect is more nuanced than previously understood, requiring specific environmental-competition dynamics.
- Novel mechanisms like transgenerational plasticity and causal chains in environmental variables contribute to the temporal storage effect.
- The storage effect is likely a more prevalent phenomenon in nature than currently recognized.
Keywords:
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