Linking Population Processes and Ecosystem Processes Through Changes in Plant Chemistry

Abstract

It’s refreshing to watch the ongoing synthesis between population-level processes and ecosystemlevel processes that is taking place in the ecological literature. After decades during which the two fields developed without adequate interaction, population ecology and ecosystem ecology are coming back together. And we shouldn’t be surprised; ecosystem ecology emerged in large part from studies of successional processes (Gleason 1926, Clements 1936), and Tansley (1935) was explicit in pointing out that ecosystems exist as interactions between organisms and the abiotic environment.