Work

Productivity and tolerance reveal the shift from competition to facilitation among multiple species under multiple stressors

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Interspecific competition and facilitation play essential roles in community structure, and have been widely demonstrated between pairwise species. However, little is known about how interspecific interactions among multiple species shift between competition and facilitation under multiple stressors. Here, we developed a dynamic model to investigate how the biomass of three dominant species (Ceratophyllum demersum, Hydrocharis dubia, and Phragmites australis) shift across total nitrogen (TN) and water depth (WD) gradients, and further clarified the interspecific interactions among three species compared with those between pairwise species. The results were as follows: (1) interspecific competition shifted to facilitation with an increase of the TN stress and mainly occurred on the stress–intolerant species; (2) this shift with two stressors occurred under lower TN level than that with a single TN stress, and the shift occurred under higher TN level among the three species than between pairwise species. We suggested that: (1) the shift from interspecific competition to facilitation mainly depended on the high positive feedback effect improving weak productivity under extreme stress; (2) the threshold of this shift was due to the acceleration or deceleration of productivity under high stress by multiple stressors and multiple species, respectively. Our study proposed adaptation mechanisms from the perspective of the interspecific interactions among multiple species, which could be explained by the productivity and tolerance of species under multiple environmental stressors. This research provides new ideas and methods for gaining insight on the co-existence of multiple species and the system stability of plant communities.

Source: Ecological Indicators

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolind.2025.113320

Authors: Shuhan Li, Man Qi, Haiying Lin, Qianzhao Sun, Wei Yang, Tao Sun