The Assembly of Species Communities: Chance or Competition?
EcologyPublished 1 December 1979
Edward F. Connor, Daniel Simberloff
Citations1,198
SJR quartileQ1
SJR score2.04
SNIP1.53
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Abstract
We challenge Diamond's (1975) idea that island species distributions are determined predominantly by competitions canonized by his "assembly rules." We show that every assembly rule is either tautological, trivial, or a pattern expected were species distributed at random. In order to demonstrate that competition is responsible for the joint distributions of species, one would have to falsify a null hypothesis stating that the distributions are generated by the species randomly and individually colonizing an archipelago.
Keywords
Agricultural and Biological SciencesEnvironmental Science
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