Diversity-disturbance relationships: frequency and intensity interact

作者：Hall Alex R^*; Miller Adam D; Leggett Helen C; Roxburgh Stephen H; Buckling Angus; Shea Katriona

来源：Biology Letters, 2012, 8(5): 768-771.

DOI：10.1098/rsbl.2012.0282

• disturbance
• microcosm
• Pseudomonas fluorescens
• intermediate disturbance hypothesis

An influential ecological theory, the intermediate disturbance hypothesis (IDH), predicts that intermediate levels of disturbance will maximize species diversity. Empirical studies, however, have described a wide variety of diversity-disturbance relationships (DDRs). Using experimental populations of microbes, we show that the form of the DDR depends on an interaction between disturbance frequency and intensity. We find that diversity shows a monotonically increasing, unimodal or flat relationship with disturbance, depending on the values of the disturbance aspects considered. These results confirm recent theoretical predictions, and potentially reconcile the conflicting body of empirical evidence on DDRs.

• 出版日期2012-10-23
• 单位CSIRO