Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Brief Communications Arising
  • Published:

How foreign is the past?

Nature volume 538, pages E1–E2 (2016)Cite this article

Subjects

arising from S. K. Lyons et al. 529, 80–83 (2016); 10.1038/nature16447

Since Humboldt and Darwin, ecologists have puzzled over what determines community assembly and structure and how community structure may change with time. Human activity is one potential driver. Impacts of modern human societies on the environment and its biota are massive, with many forms of pollution, loss and fragmentation of habitats, and extensive introductions of exotic species changing many ecological and biogeographical patterns. Prehistoric societies might be expected to have had a much lower impact on their environment. However, Lyons and colleagues1 propose that biotic communities were so fragile that the limited settlements, agriculture, and associated activities 6,000 years ago in North America were sufficient to fundamentally change community-assembly rules. There is a Reply to this Brief Communication Arising by Lyons, S. K. et al. Nature 538, http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature20097.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: Break-point re-analysis of the ‘no-island’ dataset using log[age] as the predictor and a Gaussian link function.
Figure 2: Effect of number of observations on the proportion of aggregated taxon pairs for the datasets used by Lyons et al.

References

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

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  2. Sanderson, J. G. & Pimm, S. L. Patterns in Nature. The Analysis of Species Co-occurrences. (Univ. Chicago Press, 2015)

  3. Gotelli, N. J. & Ulrich, W. The empirical Bayes approach as a tool to identify non-random species associations. Oecologia 162, 463–477 (2010)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  4. Gotelli, N. J. & McCabe, D. J. Species co-occurrence: a meta-analysis of J. M. Diamond’s assembly rules model. Ecology 83, 2091–2096 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Plummer, M. JAGS: a program for analysis of Bayesian graphical models using Gibbs sampling. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Distributed Statistical Computing (DSC 2003), March 20–22, Vienna, Austria (2003)

  6. Spiegelhalter, D. J., Best, N. G., Carlin, B. P. & van der Linde, A. Bayesian measures of model complexity and fit. J. R. Stat. Soc. Series B Stat. Methodol. 64, 583–639 (2002)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  7. von Gagern, M., von Gagern, M. & Schmitz Ornés, A. Problems with bins: a critical reassessment of Gotelli and Ulrich’s Bayes approach using bird data. Acta Oecol. 69, 137–145 (2015)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, University of Bergen, PO Box 7803, Bergen, N-5020, Norway

    Richard J. Telford, Joseph D. Chipperfield, Hilary H. Birks & H. John B. Birks

  2. Environmental Change Research Centre, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT, UK

    H. John B. Birks

Authors
  1. Richard J. Telford
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Joseph D. Chipperfield
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Hilary H. Birks
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. H. John B. Birks
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

All authors discussed the manuscript. R.J.T. investigated the modern datasets and ran the power tests. J.D.C. carried out the break-point analyses. R.J.T., H.H.B., and H.J.B.B. contributed to the first draft. All authors edited the final draft.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Richard J. Telford.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Figure 1 Effect of number of observations on percentage of aggregated taxon pairs for four datasets used by Lyons et al.

a–d, US desert rodents (a), Holocene mammals (b), 1,000-year-old North American pollen (c), and 1950 Wisconsin understorey vegetation (d). Grey band shows 95% confidence interval of a local regression smoother fitted with a quasi-binomial distribution.

Extended Data Table 1 Estimated age (years) of the break point and its 95% confidence interval (credible interval for MCMC model) for different subsets of the data
Full size table

PowerPoint slides

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Telford, R., Chipperfield, J., Birks, H. et al. How foreign is the past?. Nature 538, E1–E2 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature20096

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature20096

Comments

By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines. If you find something abusive or that does not comply with our terms or guidelines please flag it as inappropriate.

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing