Disturbance and diversity in experimental microcosms

Angus Buckling (), Rees Kassen, Graham Bell and Paul B. Rainey
Additional contact information
Angus Buckling: University of Oxford
Rees Kassen: McGill University
Graham Bell: McGill University
Paul B. Rainey: University of Oxford

Nature, 2000, vol. 408, issue 6815, 961-964

Abstract: Abstract External agents of mortality (disturbances) occur over a wide range of scales of space and time, and are believed to have large effects on species diversity. The “intermediate disturbance hypothesis”1,2,3, which proposes maximum diversity at intermediate frequencies of disturbance, has received support from both field4,5 and laboratory6,7 studies. Coexistence of species at intermediate frequencies of disturbance is thought to require trade-offs between competitive ability and disturbance tolerance8, and a metapopulation structure, with disturbance affecting only a few patches at any given time9,10,11. However, a unimodal relationship can also be generated by global disturbances that affect all patches simultaneously, provided that the environment contains spatial niches to which different species are adapted12. Here we report the results of tests of this model using both isogenic and diverse populations of the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens. In both cases, a unimodal relationship between diversity and disturbance frequency was generated in heterogeneous, but not in homogeneous, environments. The cause of this relationship is competition among niche-specialist genotypes, which maintains diversity at intermediate disturbance, but not at high or low disturbance. Our results show that disturbance can modulate the effect of spatial heterogeneity on biological diversity in natural environments.

Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/35050080 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:408:y:2000:i:6815:d:10.1038_35050080

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/35050080

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().