Short-Term Instabilities and Long-Term Community Dynamics

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Trends in Ecology and Evolution

Volume

4

Issue

10

Publisher

Cell Press

Publication Date

10-1989

First Page

293

Last Page

298

Abstract

Competition in a temporally variable environment leads to sequences of short-term instabilities that in some cases are the mechanism of long-term coexistence; in other cases they promote long-term instability. Recent work associates long-term stability with a positive relationship between environmental and competitive effects and with population growth rates that are buffered against jointly unfavorable environmental and competitive events. Buffered growth rates arise from population subdivision over life-history stages, microenvironments or phenotypes. A distinct but related mechanism of long-term stability relies on population growth rates that are nonlinear functions of competition. New ways of understanding and investigating species diversity follow from these results.

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