Community Dynamics and Stability
Community Dynamics and Stability
This chapter explores the implications of climate change for community composition, dynamics, and stability. It also looks at further examples in which climatic variability mediates interactions among species, in some cases degrading community stability and in other cases promoting it. Ecological theory offers contrasting predictions regarding the consequences for species coexistence and community stability of environmental variability. For instance, short-term instabilities in community composition owing to, for example, high-frequency environmental disturbance may promote the long-term coexistence of species by preventing competitive exclusion of one species by another. Other work suggests, however, that the stability of biological communities in stochastic environments is only possible if there is sufficiently strong self-regulation at one or more trophic levels, or if self-regulation is strong while species interactions are weak, because environmental erosion of population stability at one trophic level may contribute to instability of the community as a whole.
Keywords: climate change, community composition, community dynamics, community stability, climatic variability, ecological theory, environmental variability, stochastic environments, environmental disturbance
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