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Science 15 October 1999:
Vol. 286. no. 5439, p. 373
DOI: 10.1126/science.286.5439.373l
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The stability of an ecological community is thought to depend on the number of species it contains and the strengths of the interactions between them. Using a combination of theoretical approaches, Ives et al. (p. 542) show how the effects of competitive interactions and species number on community resilience depend on parameters such as the intrinsic rate of population growth and cross-correlations between exogenous factors that affect different species. They find that the number of species and interspecific competition have little influence on variance in community-level attributes such as total biomass; rather, total community biomass depends only on how the constituent species respond to environmental fluctuations.




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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)