Jonathan and colleagues publish a synthesis paper in Ecology Letters titled “Consequences of Local Conspecific Density Effects for Plant Diversity and Community Dynamics”. Thanks to Joe LaManna for leading this project and workshop!
Figure: Up-scaling stabilizing CDD from individuals to populations to communities to metacommunities. Ways in which stabilizing/ destabilizing CDD in individual demographic performance (e.g., the relationship between survival, growth, etc. and conspecific relative to heterospecific density) might scale up to influence stabilizing/destabilizing CDD in population growth rates and community and metacommunity dynamics. Examples of stabilizing, destabilizing, or neutral CDD are given at individual, population, and community scales. Emergent metacommunity properties might be influenced by stabilizing CDD, and hypothesized effects of stabilizing CDD on metacommunities are provided. Because of scale-transition and the influence of larger scale processes, stabilizing CDD measured at the individual level may or may not translate into stabilizing CDD at higher levels of ecological organization (See Section 4).