Community regulation: variation in disturbance, competition, and predation in relation to environmental stress and recruitment.

Abstract

Provides a general, conceptual framework to aid in answering two questions. 1) Do patterns of community structure respond predictably to variation in ecological processes (disturbance, competition, predation)? 2) Does the importance of different ecological processes vary predictably in response to variation in environmental conditions (environmental stress and recruitment density)? The authors discuss the presumed relationship between the physical environment and food-web structure, describe the predictions of a model of community regulation that includes physical disturbance, predation, and competition as ecological processes, examine how variation in recruitment affects the predictions of the model, outline the predictions of the model with respect to species diversity at the basal trophic level, and describe ways in which these predictions could be tested. -from Authors