Community Structure and Interaction Webs in Shallow Marine Hard-Bottom Communities: Tests of an Environmental Stress Model

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the marine studies of community regulation to evaluate relevant community theory. The conceptual framework of community theory essentially deals with community regulation. The chapter considers a model that proposes variation in community structure depends directly on variation in the effects of abiotic disturbance, competition, and predation; and indirectly on variation in recruitment density and environmental stress. The major goal of community ecology is to determine the causes of spatial and temporal variation in community structure. The components of community structure include species diversity, species composition, relative abundance, trophic complexity, size structure, and spatial structure. Differences in community structure can occur at several scales in space and time. Community patterns can generally vary on spatial scales ranging from centimetres to hundreds of kilometers. On rocky shores, these spatial scales correspond to microspatial variation within site variation and regional and global variation. Community structure can also vary due to physical, physiological stress, and biological factors.