Assembly rules

Community assembly rules are a set of controversial rules first proposed by Jared Diamond [Diamond,Jared in "Ecology and Evolution of Communities", M. L. Cody and J. M. Diamond, Eds. (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1975), pp. 342-444.] The rules were developed after more than a decade of research into the avian assemblages on islands near New Guinea and assert that competition is responsible for determining the patterns of assemblage composition. Diamond's paper sparked nearly two decades worth of controversy in the literature spanning from the late seventies through the late nineties and is considered a turning point in community ecology.

Testing

Testing the assembly rules is a complex process that often uses computer simulations to compare characteristics of random assemblages of species to experimental data. The rules are generally regarded as hypotheses that need to be tested on an individual bases, not as accepted conclusions.

Case [Case, Ted (1983)Niche overlap and the assembly of island lizard communities. "Oikos", 41, 427-433] tested the assembly rule that species occurring together on islands should have less niche overlap than random assemblages because they have undergone specialization. His study measured niche overlap of lizards on 37 islands near Baja California and compared niche overlap to the median niche overlap of computer generated random species assemblages. He found that 30 of the 37 islands had lower niche overlap than the random assemblages and that some of the competition is due to interspecific competition.

References

Further reading

[http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/286/5445/1684a#ref7]