Guild (ecology)

Short description: Group of sympatric species with similar ecological function

A guild (or ecological guild) is any group of species that exploit the same resources, or that exploit different resources in related ways.[1][2][3] It is not necessary that the species within a guild occupy the same, or even similar, ecological niches.[lower-alpha 1]

## Contents

* 1 Details
* 1.1 Microbial guilds
* 2 Example guilds
* 3 Footnotes
* 4 References

## Details

Guilds are defined according to the locations, attributes, or activities of their component species. For example, the mode of acquiring nutrients, the mobility, and the habitat zones that the species occupy or exploit can be used to define a guild. The number of guilds occupying an ecosystem is termed its disparity.[5] Members of a guild within a given ecosystem could be competing for resources, such as space or light, while cooperating in resisting wind stresses, attracting pollinators, or detecting predators, such as happens among savannah-dwelling antelope and zebra.

A guild does not typically have strict, or even clearly defined boundaries, nor does it need to be taxonomically cohesive. A broadly defined guild will almost always have constituent guilds; for example, grazing guilds will have some species that concentrate on coarse, plentiful forage, while others concentrate on low-growing, finer plants. Each of those two sub-guilds may be regarded as guilds in appropriate contexts, and they might, in turn, have sub-guilds in more closely selective contexts. Some authorities even speak of guilds in terms of a fractal resource model.[6] This concept arises in several related contexts, such as the metabolic theory of ecology, the scaling pattern of occupancy, and spatial analysis in ecology, all of which are fundamental concepts in defining guilds.

An ecological guild is not to be confused with a taxocene, a group of phylogenetically related organisms in a community that do not necessarily share the same or similar niches (for example, "the insect community"). Nor is a guild the same as a trophic species, which is a functional group of taxa sharing the same set of predators and prey within a food web.[7]

### Microbial guilds

Some authors have used the term guild to analyze microbial communities. However, precisely because of the pointed lack of concretion in the original definition, it has been used with different connotations. Recently, some effort has been made to address this issue.[8] Some authors have proposed a formal definition for guilds that avoids this inherent ambiguity of niche exploitation, and a quantification method considering the problems arising from degeneracy in protein functions.[9] According to the authors, any organism that performs a function, regardless of its phylogenetic lineage, its environmental preferences or how it carries it out, would be regarded as a representative member of the guild. This contrasts with the definitions used for the study of macroorganisms, where membership demanded that the different forms of exploitation of the resource were related or similar.

## Example guilds

* Browsers and terrestrial folivores
* Forest canopy folivores
* Forest floor scavengers
* Grazers
* Forbs
* Graminoids (grasses, rushes and sedges)
* Plankton
* Saprophytes
* Shrubs
* Trees
* Vines
* Piscivores

## Footnotes

1. ↑ An ecological niche is defined as the role an organism plays in its community, i.e. decomposer, primary producer, etc.[4]

## References

1. ↑ Simberloff, D.; Dayan, T. (1991). "The guild concept and the structure of ecological communities". Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 22: 115–143. doi:10.1146/annurev.es.22.110191.000555.
2. ↑ "guilds". Encyclopædia Britannica. http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-70591/community-ecology.
3. ↑ Williams, S.E.; Hero, J.M. (1998). "Rainforest frogs of the Australian wet tropics: Guild classification and the ecological similarity of declining species". Proceedings: Biological Sciences 265 (1396): 597–602. doi:10.1098/rspb.1998.0336. PMID 9881468.
4. ↑ "Ecological niche". Ecological niche. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/ecological-niche. Retrieved 2017-05-02.
5. ↑ Guillerme (2020). "Disparities in the analysis of morphological disparity". Biology Letters 16 (7). doi:10.1098/rsbl.2020.0199. PMID 32603646.
6. ↑ Ritchie, Mark E. (2010). Scale, Heterogeneity, and the Structure and Diversity of Ecological Communities. Monographs in Population Biology. 45. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-09070-2.
7. ↑ Dunne, Jennifer A.; Williams, Richard J.; Martinez, Neo D. (2002-10-01). "Food-web structure and network theory: The role of connectance and size". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99 (20): 12917–12922. doi:10.1073/pnas.192407699. ISSN 0027-8424. PMID 12235364. Bibcode: 2002PNAS...9912917D.
8. ↑ Pascual-García, A.. "functionInk: An efficient method to detect functional groups in multidimensional networks reveals the hidden structure of ecological communities.". Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/656504v3.
9. ↑ Rivas-Santisteban, J.. "Quantifying microbial guilds". Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.23.550202v3.

* v
* t
* e

Ecology: Modelling ecosystems: Trophic components

General|

* Abiotic component
* Abiotic stress
* Behaviour
* Biogeochemical cycle
* Biomass
* Biotic component
* Biotic stress
* Carrying capacity
* Competition
* Ecosystem
* Ecosystem ecology
* Ecosystem model
* Keystone species
* List of feeding behaviours
* Metabolic theory of ecology
* Productivity
* Resource

Producers|

* Autotrophs
* Chemosynthesis
* Chemotrophs
* Foundation species
* Mixotrophs
* Myco-heterotrophy
* Mycotroph
* Organotrophs
* Photoheterotrophs
* Photosynthesis
* Photosynthetic efficiency
* Phototrophs
* Primary nutritional groups
* Primary production

Consumers|

* Apex predator
* Bacterivore
* Carnivores
* Chemoorganotroph
* Foraging
* Generalist and specialist species
* Intraguild predation
* Herbivores
* Heterotroph
* Heterotrophic nutrition
* Insectivore
* Mesopredators
* Mesopredator release hypothesis
* Omnivores
* Optimal foraging theory
* Planktivore
* Predation
* Prey switching

Decomposers|

* Chemoorganoheterotrophy
* Decomposition
* Detritivores
* Detritus

Microorganisms|

* Archaea
* Bacteriophage
* Environmental microbiology
* Lithoautotroph
* Lithotrophy
* Microbial cooperation
* Microbial ecology
* Microbial food web
* Microbial intelligence
* Microbial loop
* Microbial mat
* Microbial metabolism
* Phage ecology

Food webs|

* Biomagnification
* Ecological efficiency
* Ecological pyramid
* Energy flow
* Food chain
* Trophic level

Example webs|

* Cold seeps
* Hydrothermal vents
* Intertidal
* Kelp forests
* Lakes
* North Pacific Subtropical Gyre
* Rivers
* San Francisco Estuary
* Soil
* Tide pool

Processes|

* Ascendency
* Bioaccumulation
* Cascade effect
* Climax community
* Competitive exclusion principle
* Consumer-resource systems
* Copiotrophs
* Dominance
* Ecological network
* Ecological succession
* Energy quality
* Energy Systems Language
* f-ratio
* Feed conversion ratio
* Feeding frenzy
* Mesotrophic soil
* Nutrient cycle
* Oligotroph
* Paradox of the plankton
* Trophic cascade
* Trophic mutualism
* Trophic state index

Defense,
counter|

* Animal coloration
* Antipredator adaptations
* Camouflage
* Deimatic behaviour
* Herbivore adaptations to plant defense
* Mimicry
* Plant defense against herbivory
* Predator avoidance in schooling fish

* v
* t
* e

Ecology: Modelling ecosystems: Other components

Population
ecology|

* Abundance
* Allee effect
* Depensation
* Ecological yield
* Effective population size
* Intraspecific competition
* Logistic function
* Malthusian growth model
* Maximum sustainable yield
* Overpopulation in wild animals
* Overexploitation
* Population cycle
* Population dynamics
* Population modeling
* Population size
* Predator–prey (Lotka–Volterra) equations
* Recruitment
* Resilience
* Small population size
* Stability

Species|

* Biodiversity
* Density-dependent inhibition
* Ecological effects of biodiversity
* Ecological extinction
* Endemic species
* Flagship species
* Gradient analysis
* Indicator species
* Introduced species
* Invasive species
* Latitudinal gradients in species diversity
* Minimum viable population
* Neutral theory
* Occupancy–abundance relationship
* Population viability analysis
* Priority effect
* Rapoport's rule
* Relative abundance distribution
* Relative species abundance
* Species diversity
* Species homogeneity
* Species richness
* Species distribution
* Species-area curve
* Umbrella species

Species
interaction|

* Antibiosis
* Biological interaction
* Commensalism
* Community ecology
* Ecological facilitation
* Interspecific competition
* Mutualism
* Parasitism
* Storage effect
* Symbiosis

Spatial
ecology|

* Biogeography
* Cross-boundary subsidy
* Ecocline
* Ecotone
* Ecotype
* Disturbance
* Edge effects
* Foster's rule
* Habitat fragmentation
* Ideal free distribution
* Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis
* Island biogeography
* Landscape ecology
* Landscape epidemiology
* Landscape limnology
* Metapopulation
* Patch dynamics
* r/K selection theory
* Resource selection function
* Source–sink dynamics

Niche|

* Ecological niche
* Ecological trap
* Ecosystem engineer
* Environmental niche modelling
* Guild
* Habitat
* Marine habitats
* Limiting similarity
* Niche apportionment models
* Niche construction
* Niche differentiation

Other
networks|

* Assembly rules
* Bateman's principle
* Bioluminescence
* Ecological collapse
* Ecological debt
* Ecological deficit
* Ecological energetics
* Ecological indicator
* Ecological threshold
* Ecosystem diversity
* Emergence
* Extinction debt
* Kleiber's law
* Liebig's law of the minimum
* Marginal value theorem
* Thorson's rule
* Xerosere

Other|

* Allometry
* Alternative stable state
* Balance of nature
* Biological data visualization
* Ecocline
* Ecological economics
* Ecological footprint
* Ecological forecasting
* Ecological humanities
* Ecological stoichiometry
* Ecopath
* Ecosystem based fisheries
* Endolith
* Evolutionary ecology
* Functional ecology
* Industrial ecology
* Macroecology
* Microecosystem
* Natural environment
* Regime shift
* Systems ecology
* Urban ecology
* Theoretical ecology

List of ecology topics

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