New Species for the Community
New Species for the Community
This chapter considers the main processes that operate at the regional and biogeographic scales to ultimately shape local community structure—namely, speciation and biogeographic mixing of taxa. It first defines what a “species” is before discussing the range of mechanisms that give rise to new species, and more specifically reproductive isolation. In particular, it examines the extent to which the speciation process directly induces differences in ecologically important traits between the progenitor and daughter species. It then explains how the phenotypic differences generated at the time of speciation determine what type of community member the new species begins as. It also shows how past climate change affected current local and regional community structure by periodic forcing of mass movements of species across Earth and causing increases in speciation and extinction rates. Finally, it evaluates the dynamics of invasive species and their role in habitat alteration today.
Keywords: community structure, speciation, biogeographic mixing, new species, reproductive isolation, trait, climate change, extinction, invasive species, habitat alteration
Princeton Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.