Contributions to nonstationary community theory |
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Authors: | Peter Chesson |
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Affiliation: | 1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA;2. Department of Life Sciences and Center of Global Change Biology, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwanpchesson@email.arizona.eduhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-8931-8012 |
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Abstract: | ABSTRACTThe study of the role of environmental variation in community dynamics has traditionally assumed that the environment is a stationary stochastic process or a periodic deterministic process. However, the physical environment in nature is nonstationary. Moreover, anthropogenically driven climate change provides a new challenge emphasizing a persistent but frequently ignored problem: how to make predictions about the dynamics of communities when the nonstationarity of the physical environment is recognized. Recent work is providing a path to conclusions with none of the traditional assumptions of environmental stationarity or periodicity. Traditional assumptions about convergence of long-term averages of functions of environmental states can be replaced by assumptions about temporal sums, allowing convergence and persistence of population processes to be demonstrated in general nonstationary environments. These tools are further developed and illustrated here with some simple models of nonstationary community dynamics, including the Beverton-Holt model, the threshold exponential and the lottery model. |
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Keywords: | Nonstationary process climate change threshold exponential model Beverton-Holt model lottery model |
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