Long-Term Development of Biological Communities

Abstract

I shall define biological community as the species comprising a temporally and spatially localized assemblage. Although members of a community may interact, I do not wish to imply that the community behaves as a functional unit or that interactions among members determine its structure. When discussing community structure in this paper, I refer exclusively to the diversity of species because of the general availability of comparative data and because most of community theory makes predictions concerning number of coexisting species. Other important community attributes, such as relative abundance patterns, trophic level structure, food web organization, resistance to and recovery from perturbation, and physical architecture, will not be considered.