Priority effect is the impact that a particular species can have on ecological community development due to prior arrival at a site (Young et al. 2001, Lulow 2004, Fukami et al. 2005).

There are two basic types: Inhibitory priority effects occur when a species that arrives first at a site negatively impacts a species that arrives later by reducing the availability of space or resources. Facilitative priority effects occur when a species that arrives first at a site alters abiotic or biotic conditions in ways that positively impact a species arriving later (Connell and Slatyer 1977, Fukami et al. 2005). Priority effects are a central and pervasive element of ecological community development. These effects have important implications for natural systems as well as ecological restoration

Restoration ecology

-Definition:Restoration ecology is the scientific study and practice of renewing and restoring degraded, damaged, or destroyed ecosystems and habitats in the environment by active human intervention and action, within a short time frame...

 efforts (Fukami et al. 2005, Young et al. 2005).

Community Succession Theory

Early in the 20th century, Frederic Clements

Frederic Clements

Frederic Edward Clements was an American plant ecologist and pioneer in the study of vegetation succession.-Biography:...

 (1936) and other plant ecologists suggested that ecological communities develop in a linear, directional manner towards a final, stable end-point: the climax community. Clements indicated that a given site’s climax community would reflect local climate. He conceptualized the climax community

Climax community

In ecology, a climax community, or climatic climax community, is a biological community of plants and animals which, through the process of ecological succession — the development of vegetation in an area over time — has reached a steady state. This equilibrium occurs because the climax community...

 as a “superorganism” that followed a defined developmental sequence (Clements 1916).

Early succession

Ecological succession

Ecological succession, is the phenomenon or process by which a community progressively transforms itself until a stable community is formed. It is a fundamental concept in ecology, and refers to more or less predictable and orderly changes in the composition or structure of an ecological community...

 theory maintained that the directional shifts from one stage of succession to the next were induced by the plants themselves (Tansley 1935). In this sense, succession theory implicitly recognized priority effects; the prior arrival of certain species had important impacts on future community composition. At the same time, the climax concept implied that species shifts were predetermined. A given species would always appear at the same point during the development of the climax community, and always have the same impact on community development.

This static view of priority effects remained essentially unchanged by the concept of patch dynamics, which was introduced by Alex Watt (1947). Watt conceived of plant communities as dynamic “mechanisms” that followed predetermined successional cycles. Although Watt questioned the idea of a stable endpoint to community development, he seemed to agree with Clements that each particular species had a predetermined role to play in community development. They viewed succession as a process driven by facilitation, in which each species made local conditions more suitable for another species.

Individualistic Approaches

Henry Gleason

Henry Gleason

Henry Allan Gleason was a noted American ecologist, botanist, and taxonomist, most recognized for his endorsement of the individualistic/open community concept of ecological succession.- Life and work :...

 (1926) presented an alternative hypothesis in which plants were conceptualized as individuals rather than components of a superorganism. Gleason suggested that the distribution of various species across the landscape reflected species-specific dispersal limitations and environmental requirements rather than predetermined associations among species. Gleason set the stage for future research on priority effects by explaining that initially identical ponds colonized by different species could develop through succession into very different communities. Thus, Gleason contested the idea of a predetermined climax community and recognized that different colonizing species could produce alternative trajectories of community development.

Frank Egler (1954) built on Gleason’s allusion to the concept of priority effects by developing the Initial Floristic Composition (IFC) model to describe community development in abandoned agricultural fields. According to the IFC model, the set of species present in a field immediately after abandonment had strong influences on community development and final community composition. Although rooted in succession theory, this approach foreshadowed the development of alternative stable state and community assembly theory. (Young et al. 2001).

Alternative Stable States

In the 1970s, it was suggested that natural communities could be characterized by multiple or alternative stable states (Lewontin 1969, Holling 1973, May 1977). In accordance with the conclusions of Gleason (1926) and Egler (1954), multiple stable state models indicated that the same environment could support several different combinations of species. Theorists argued that historical context could play a central role in determining which stable state would be present at any given time. May (1977) succinctly explained, “if there is a unique stable state, historical accidents are unimportant; if there are many alternative locally stable states, historical accidents can be of overriding significance.”

Community Assembly Theory

The development of assembly theory followed from the emergence of alternative stable state theory. Assembly theory explains community development processes in the context of multiple stable states (Young et al. 2001). It asks why a particular type of community developed when other stable community types were possible. In contrast to succession theory, assembly theory was developed largely by animal ecologists and explicitly incorporated historical context (Young et al. 2001).

In one of the first models based on this theory, Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond

Jared Mason Diamond is an American scientist and author whose work draws from a variety of fields. He is currently Professor of Geography and Physiology at UCLA...

 (1975) developed quantitative “assembly rules” to predict avian community composition on an archipelago. Although the idea of deterministic community assembly quickly drew criticism (e.g., Connor and Simberloff 1979), the assembly approach, which emphasized historical contingency and multiple stable states, continued to gain support (e.g., May 1977, Hughes 1989). Drake (1991) used an assembly model to demonstrate that different community types would result from different sequences of species invasions. In Drake’s model, early invaders had major impacts on the invasion success of species that arrived later. Other modeling studies suggested that priority effects may be especially important when invasion frequency is low enough to allow species to become established before replacement (Lockwood et al. 1997), or when other factors that could drive assembly (e.g., competition, abiotic stress) are relatively unimportant (Weiher and Keddy 1995). In a recent review, Belyea and Lancaster (1999) described three basic determinants of community assembly: dispersal constraints, environmental constraints, and internal dynamics. They identified priority effects as a manifestation of the interaction between dispersal constraints and internal dynamics.

Empirical Evidence

On January 25, 2007, a search of the ISI Web of Science citation index using the key word “priority effect*” returned 65 ecology-related studies. The first study to explicitly mention priority effects was published in 1983. Although early research focused on animals and aquatic systems, more recent studies have begun to examine terrestrial and plant-based priority effects. Inhibitory priority effects have been documented more frequently than facilitative priority effects. Priority effects among species within the same trophic level and functional group, or guild, have been documented more frequently than effects across trophic levels or guilds. Studies indicate that both abiotic (e.g., resource availability) and biotic (e.g., predation) factors can affect the strength of priority effects.

Aquatic Examples

Most of the earliest empirical evidence for priority effects came from studies on aquatic animals. Sutherland (1974) found that final community composition varied depending on the initial order of larval recruitment in a community of small aquatic organisms (sponges, tunicates, hydroids, and other species). Shulman et al. (1983) and Almany (2003) found strong priority effects among coral reef fish. The former study found that prior establishment by a territorial damselfish reduced establishment rates of other fish. The authors also identified cross-trophic priority effects; prior establishment by a predator fish reduced establishment rates of prey fishes.

In the late 1980s, several studies examined priority effects in aquatic microcosms. Robinson and Dickerson (1987) found that priority effects were important in some cases, but suggested that “being the first to invade a habitat does not guarantee success; there must be sufficient time for the early colonist to increase its population size for it to pre-empt further colonization.” Robinson and Edgemon (1988) later developed fifty-four communities of phytoplankton species by varying invasion order, invasion rate, and invasion timing. They found that although invasion order (priority effects) could explain a small fraction of the resulting variation in community composition, most of the variation was explained by changes in invasion rate and invasion timing. These studies indicate that priority effects may not be the only or the most important historical factor affecting the trajectory of community development.

In a striking example of cross-trophic priority effects, Hart (1992) found that priority effects explain the maintenance of two alternate stable states in stream ecosystems. While a macroalga is dominant in some patches, sessile grazers maintain a “lawn” of small microalgae in others. If the sessile grazers colonize a patch first, they exclude the macroalga, and vice versa.

Amphibian Examples

In two of the most commonly cited empirical studies on priority effects, Alford and Wilbur (1985, Wilbur and Alford 1985) documented inhibitory and facilitative priority effects among frog and toad larvae in experimental ponds. They found that hatchlings of a toad species (Bufo americanus) exhibited higher growth and survivorship when introduced to a pond before those of a frog species (Rana sphenocephala). The frog larvae, however, did best when introduced after the toad larvae. Thus, prior establishment by the toad species appeared to facilitate the frog species, while prior establishment by the frog species inhibited the toad species. More recent studies on tree frogs have also documented both types of priority effect (Morin 1987, Warner et al. 1991). Morin (1987) also observed that priority effects became less important in the presence of a predatory salamander. He hypothesized that predation mediated priority effects by reducing competition between frog species. Studies on larval insects and frogs in water-filled tree holes and stumps found that abiotic factors such as space, resource availability, and toxin levels can also be important in mediating priority effects (Fincke 1999, Sunahara and Mogi 2002).

Terrestrial Examples

Terrestrial studies on priority effects are rare. The aforementioned ISI Web of Science search retrieved only 19 studies on fully terrestrial organisms, and all of these studies were published during or after 1993. Most studies have focused on arthropods or grassland plant species. In a lab experiment, Shorrocks and Bingley (1994) showed that prior arrival increased survivorship for two species of fruit flies; each fly species had inhibitory impacts on the other. A field study on desert spiders by Ehmann and MacMahon (1996) showed that the presence of species from one spider guild reduced establishment of spiders from a different guild. More recently, Palmer et al. (2003) demonstrated that priority effects allowed a competitively subordinate ant species to avoid exclusion by a competitively dominant species. If the competitively subordinate ants were able to colonize first, they altered their host tree’s morphology in ways that made it less suitable for other ant species. This study was especially important because it was able to identify a mechanism driving observed priority effects.

With the exception of an early study exploring the facilitative effects of litter deposition (e.g., Facelli and Facelli 1993), studies that explicitly addressed terrestrial plant priority effects began to appear in the literature around the year 2000. A study on two species of introduced grasses in Hawaiian woodlands found that the species with inferior competitive abilities may be able to persist through priority effects (D'Antonio et al. 2001). At least three studies have come to similar conclusions about the coexistence of native and exotic grasses in California grassland ecosystems (Seabloom et al. 2003, Corbin and D'Antonio 2004, Lulow 2006). If given time to establish, native species can successfully inhibit the establishment of exotics. Authors of the various studies attributed the prevalence of exotic grasses in California to the low seed production and relatively poor dispersal ability of native species.

Long-term Implications: Convergence and Divergence

Although many studies have documented priority effects, the persistence of these effects over time often remains unclear. Young et al. (2001) indicated that both convergence (in which “communities proceed towards a predisturbance state regardless of historical conditions”) and divergence (in which historical factors continue to affect the long-term trajectory of community development) are present in nature. Among studies of priority effects, both trends seem to have been observed (e.g., Hart 1992, Lulow 2004). Fukami et al. (2005) argued that a community could be both convergent and divergent at different levels of community organization. The authors studied experimentally-assembled plant communities and found that while the identities of individual species remained unique across different community replicates, species traits generally became more similar.

Priority Effects and Trophic Ecology

Some studies indicate that priority effects can occur across guilds

Guild (ecology)

A guild is any group of species that exploit the same resources, often in related ways. As can be seen from the list of examples below, it does not follow that the species within a guild occupy the same, or even similar, ecological niches...

 (e.g., Ehmann and MacMahon 1996) or trophic level

Trophic level

The trophic level of an organism is the position it occupies in a food chain. The word trophic derives from the Greek τροφή referring to food or feeding. A food chain represents a succession of organisms that eat another organism and are, in turn, eaten themselves. The number of steps an organism...

s (e.g., Hart 1992). Such priority effects could have dramatic impacts on community composition and food web

Food web

A food web depicts feeding connections in an ecological community. Ecologists can broadly lump all life forms into one of two categories called trophic levels: 1) the autotrophs, and 2) the heterotrophs...

 structure. Further research will be necessary to determine the prevalence and importance of inter-guild and cross-trophic priority effects.
Even intra-guild priority effects could have important consequences at multiple trophic levels if the affected species are associated with unique predator or prey species. Consider, for example, a plant species that is eaten by a host-specific herbivore. Priority effects that influence the ability of the plant species to establish would indirectly affect the establishment success of the associated herbivore. Theoretical models have described cyclical assembly dynamics in which species associated with different suites of predators are able to repeatedly replace one another (Leibold et al. 2004, Steiner and Leibold 2004). Despite these theoretical conclusions, empirical studies have tended to ignore the trophic consequences of intraguild priority effects.

Intraspecific Aggregation and Priority Effects

In situations where two species are introduced at the same time, spatial aggregation of a species’ propagules could cause priority effects by initially reducing interspecific competition

Competition

Competition is a contest between individuals, groups, animals, etc. for territory, a niche, or a location of resources. It arises whenever two and only two strive for a goal which cannot be shared. Competition occurs naturally between living organisms which co-exist in the same environment. For...

 (Inouye 1999). Aggregation during recruitment and establishment could allow inferior competitors to coexist with or even displace competitive dominants over the long-term. Several modeling efforts have begun to examine the implications of spatial priority effects for species coexistence (e.g., Shorrocks and Bingley 1994, Chesson 2000, Hartley and Shorrocks 2002, Molofsky and Bever 2002). Rejmanek (2002) suggested that only 10 empirical studies examining intraspecific aggregation had been published by 2002.

Mechanisms and New Organisms

The literature on priority effects is currently growing in both depth and breadth. A few studies have begun to explore the mechanisms driving observed priority effects (e.g., Palmer et al. 2003). Moreover, although past studies focused on a small subset of species, recent papers indicate that priority effects may be important for a wide range of organisms, including fungi (Kennedy and Bruns 2005, Rohlfs 2005), birds (Gamarra et al. 2005), lizards (M'Closkey et al. 1998), and salamanders (Eitam et al. 2005).

Implications for Ecological Restoration

Priority effects have important implications for ecological restoration

Restoration ecology

-Definition:Restoration ecology is the scientific study and practice of renewing and restoring degraded, damaged, or destroyed ecosystems and habitats in the environment by active human intervention and action, within a short time frame...

. In many systems, information about priority effects can help practitioners identify cost-effective strategies for improving the survival and persistence of certain species, especially species of inferior competitive ability (Lulow 2004, Suding et al. 2004, Young et al. 2005). For example, in a study on the restoration of native Californian grasses and forbs, Lulow (2004) found that forbs could not establish in plots where she had previously planted bunchgrasses. When bunchgrasses were added to plots where forbs had already been growing for a year, forbs were able to coexist with grasses for at least 3–4 years. Lulow’s results suggested that planting forbs before grasses might improve forb persistence in this system.

If spatial priority can act as a substitute for temporal priority, restoration practitioners might be able to reduce the time and money associated with repeated introductions by using a patchy monoculture approach rather than the traditional mixture approach for restoration projects. It is important to note that because priority effects can be either facilitative or inhibitory, specific restoration recommendations will probably be different for different species.