Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Ecology Letters

Volume

19

Issue

11

Publisher

Wiley Online Library

Publication Date

11-2016

First Page

1333

Last Page

1342

Abstract

The storage effect, originally a theoretical hypothesis to explain how ecologically similar species could coexist by responding differently to environmental variability (Chesson & Warner, 1981; Shmida & Ellner, 1984), has developed into a core concept in community ecology (Mittelbach 2012)with empirical support from communities of prairie grasses (Adler et al., 2006), desert annual plants (Pake & Venable, 1995; Angert et al., 2009), tropical trees (Usinowicz et al., 2012) and zooplankton(Caceres, 1997). An essential step in this maturation was mathematical analysis (Chesson, 1994, 2000a) that identified the conditions required for the storage effect to help stabilize coexistence of competitors. For the temporal storage effect, the focus of this paper, those conditions include (1)species-specific responses to environmental variability, (2) density-dependent covariance between environment and competition, and (3) buffered population growth.

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