As the time from fallow establishment proceeded, there was a tendency to patch re-organization by biotic effects.
Growing concern regarding the geomorphic and associated biotic effects of dune management practises has led to an increase in the number of dune restoration projects globally.
Therefore, sequences of fossil floras that include a mix of early and later successional communities may not be appropriate to study long-term temporal trends or biotic effects of climate, latitude, or other variables.
Further, differences in soil humidity could not explain the changes in structure and abundance of the collembolan community alone, sheep grazing may drive changes in collembolan community through mechanisms of biotic effects.
However, research that links organismal functional strategies to community assembly rules in real, heterogeneous landscapes demonstrate that predictable tradeoffs among species do not consistently scale up to the community level, necessitating further research on trait-based community assembly in order to develop general predictive models of biotic effects on ecosystem multifunctionality.
In contrast, high levels of environmental stress might cancel positive biotic effects as species begin to respond similarly to environmental conditions [12], [13].
While the results of studies that manipulate both diversity and environmental stress generally conclude that stress modulates the strength of diversity effects, the direction of the effect appears idiosyncratic, with environmental stress heightening [10] or weakening [11], [12] biotic effects depending on the study.
Finally, biotic effects such as host plant interactions can contribute to the geographic diversification of a group [ 25, 26].
These biotic effects are always based upon changes in abiotic conditions which are variable over space and time, and therefore difficult to quantify (Matlack, 1993; Camargo and Kapos, 1995; Newmark, 2001).
As the biotic effects will fade out after a certain distance, it is not necessary to model larger gaps, as colonizer survival will stay constant after a certain distance (S = SE).
