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Long-Term Development of Biological Communities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2017

Robert E. Ricklefs*
Affiliation:
Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
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Extract

I shall define biological community as the species comprising a temporally and spatially localized assemblage. Although members of a community may interact, I do not wish to imply that the community behaves as a functional unit or that interactions among members determine its structure. When discussing community structure in this paper, I refer exclusively to the diversity of species because of the general availability of comparative data and because most of community theory makes predictions concerning number of coexisting species. Other important community attributes, such as relative abundance patterns, trophic level structure, food web organization, resistance to and recovery from perturbation, and physical architecture, will not be considered.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 Paleontological Society 

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