Facilitating an importance index

An unresolved question in plant ecology is how the balance between positive and negative interactions changes with environmental conditions. Recently, the debate has been expanded by Brooker & Kikvidze (2008), reintroducing the importance, rather than the intensity, of interactions as the appropriate concept for empirical studies. Importance is the difference in performance with interactions relative to all affecting factors. Positive interactions among plants (facilitation) are common in nature. However, the advocated importance indices fail to address facilitation and can thus not be applied to studying shifts in the balance between positive and negative interactions. The deficiencies of the current importance indices are both conceptual as well as mathematical. In particular, their maximum performance estimator is based on the assumption that it can only be attained in the absence of neighbours. We suggest two major improvements. First, we use the target's overall maximum performance as a surrogate for the plant optimum, i.e. we allow the possibility of higher performance with neighbours (i.e. facilitation). Second, we propose an alternative approach to treat the factors affecting measured performance. The new index is limited in its range [-1, 1], is symmetrical for competition and facilitation, and it preserves the intuitive nature of the original index by Brooker & Kikvidze (2008). Synthesis. The concept of interaction importance is useful for studying interactions along environmental gradients. In contrast to previous indices, our index accommodates facilitative interactions and thus offers a significant conceptual and methodological advancement. We advocate its use in future empirical studies.