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  • Brief Communications Arising
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Questioning Holocene community shifts

Nature volume 537, pages E4–E5 (2016)Cite this article

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ARISING FROM S. K. Lyons et al. Nature 529, 80–83 (2016); doi: 10.1038/nature16447

Demonstrating changes in the structure of plant and animal communities over geological time scales and linking these changes to human impacts in the Holocene epoch would be an important contribution to the fields of ecology and conservation biology1. Lyons et al.2 claim to provide such evidence based on a decrease in the proportion of spatially aggregated species pairs, using co-occurrence data from assemblages spanning the past 300 million years. However, we suggest that apparent flaws in their predictions, assumptions, methods and interpretations undermine this claim, and we question the conclusion that the structure of communities has fundamentally changed during the Holocene. There is a Reply to this Brief Communication Arising by Lyons, S. K. et al. Nature 537, http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature19111 (2016).

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Figure 1: Models of community structure over time: three types of possible bias.

References

  1. Dietl, G. P. Ecology: Different worlds. Nature 529, 29–30 (2016)

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  2. Lyons, S. K. et al. Holocene shifts in the assembly of plant and animal communities implicate human impacts. Nature 529, 80–83 (2016)

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  3. Corlett, R. T. The Anthropocene concept in ecology and conservation. Trends Ecol. Evol. 30, 36–41 (2015)

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Département d’écologie & évolution, Université de Lausanne, Le Biophore, UNIL-Sorge, Lausanne, 1015, Switzerland

    Cleo Bertelsmeier

  2. Ecologie Systématique Evolution, CNRS, Univ. Paris-Sud, AgroParisTech, Université Paris-Saclay, Orsay, 91400, France

    Sébastien Ollier

Authors
  1. Cleo Bertelsmeier
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  2. Sébastien Ollier
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Contributions

C.B and S.O designed the study, analysed the data and wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Cleo Bertelsmeier.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Data

This file contains the R script for the analyses. (TXT 6 kb)

Supplementary Data

This file contains the full data set for the analysis. (CSV 6 kb)

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Bertelsmeier, C., Ollier, S. Questioning Holocene community shifts. Nature 537, E4–E5 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature19110

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