COMMUNITIES III
METHODS OF DESCRIPTION
I. Methods in plant ecology
The association as the basic unit of study
An association is a set of plants of definite floristic composition
A. Do particular species tend to co-occur?
This asks if "species groups" are objectively real
1. Association analysis
2. Effects of quadrat size
"mean square analyses"
3. Plotless methods
4. Gradient analysis
B. Causes of patterns in plant communities
1. Physical causes
a. nutrients
b. soil type
c. soil depth
d. water relations
2. Biotic causes
a. competition
b. animals
i. herbivores
ii. seed predators
iii. seed dispersers
iv. pollinators
v. disturbance
II. Methods in animal ecology
A. Questions
1. The relative numbers of species
a. Species diversity
b. Components of species diversity
i. the number of species
ii. the distribution of individuals among the species
H = - ∑ pi ln pi
Balvanera, P., Kremen, C., Martínez-Ramos, M. 2005: Applying community structure analysis to
ecosystem function: examples from pollination and carbon storage. Ecological
Applications: Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 360–375.
Boulinier, T., Nichols, J. D., Hines, J. E., Sauer, J. R., Flather, C. H., Pollock, K. H. 2001: Forest
fragmentation and bird community dynamics: inference at regional scales. Ecology: Vol.
82, No. 4, pp. 1159–1169.
Dolédec, S., Chessel, D., Gimaret-Carpentier, C. 2000: Niche separation in community analysis: a
new method. Ecology: Vol. 81, No. 10, pp. 2914–2927.
Ebenman, B., Law, R., Borrvall, C. 2004: Community viability analysis: the response of ecological
communities to species loss. Ecology: Vol. 85, No. 9, pp. 2591–2600.
Foreman and Hahn Ecol. 1980 61:1267
Greig-Smith J. Ecol. 1979 67:755
Hewitt, J. E., Anderson, M. J., Thrush, S. F. 2005: Assessing and monitoring ecological community
health in marine systems. Ecological Applications: Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 942–953.
McArdle, B. H., Anderson, M. J. 2001: Fitting multivariate models to community data: a comment
on distance-based redundancy analysis. Ecology: Vol. 82, No. 1, pp. 290–297.
Olden, J. D., Joy, M. K., Death, R. G. 2006: Rediscovering the species in community-wide
predictive modeling. Ecological Applications: Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 1449–1460.
Schaefer, J., Gido, K., Smith, M. 2005: A test for community change using a null model approach.
Ecological Applications: Vol. 15, No. 5, pp. 1761–1771.
Weiss, J. M., Reice, S. R. 2005: The aggregation of impacts: using species-specific effects to infer
community-level disturbances. Ecological Applications: Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 599–617.