Community
In the three exercises in this section we will build a hypothetical community along an environmental gradient and then use the tools for classifying and sorting communities and seeing how they behave. The idea is to contrast two competing views of community ecology: (1) communities have defined boundaries and (2) there is a gradual transition in species replacement along environmental gradients.
Natural disturbances were long considered an exogenous and rare factor in natural systems, but today they are fully incorporated as an important factor in the organization of communities. Furthermore, the study of disturbances acquired greater importance with the increase in their intensity and frequency by the action of man. After disturbances, plant communities tend to return to a state similar to the initial one, which we call ecological succession. Here we will address the relationships between disturbance and succession, focusing on coexistence and colonization/competition tradeoff in simple models of community dynamics.
Learn about the method used by May to assess the stability of dynamical systems and reproduce her results.
Neutral models in ecology assume that all species are competitively equivalent, unlike niche-based models. Let's examine two of the most important neutral theories in ecology, both published in Princenton University's influential monograph series MPB.