Abstract
Competition in a temporally variable environment leads to sequences of short-term instabilities that in some cases are the mechanism of long-term coexistence; in other cases they promote long-term instability. Recent work associates long-term stability with a positive relationship between environmental and competitive effects and with population growth rates that are buffered against jointly unfavorable environmental and competitive events. Buffered growth rates arise from population subdivision over life-history stages, microenvironments or phenotypes. A distinct but related mechanism of long-term stability relies on population growth rates that are nonlinear functions of competition. New ways of understanding and investigating species diversity follow from these results.
Keywords
Term (time)Competition (biology)PopulationPopulation growthInstabilityStability (learning theory)Competitive exclusionStorage effectMechanism (biology)Leslie matrixEcologyBiologyEvolutionary biologyDemographyComputer scienceMechanicsPhysics
Affiliated Institutions
Related Publications
Mechanisms of Maintenance of Species Diversity
▪ Abstract The focus of most ideas on diversity maintenance is species coexistence, which may be stable or unstable. Stable coexistence can be quantified by the long-term rates ...
The Roles of Harsh and Fluctuating Conditions in the Dynamics of Ecological Communities
Harsh conditions (e.g., mortality and stress) reduce population growth rates directly; secondarily, they may reduce the intensity of interactions between organisms. Near-exclusi...
A General Hypothesis of Species Diversity
A new hypothesis, based on differences in the rates at which populations of competing species approach competitive equilibrium (reduction or exclusion of some species), is propo...
Competition and coexistence in plant communities
Few ecologists today doubt that competition is an important structuring factor in plant communities, but researchers disagree on the circumstances where it is most intense, and ...
Predator-Mediated Coexistence: A Nonequilibrium Model
There is now convincing evidence, from a variety of ecological systems, that predation is capable of maintaining coexistence among a set of competing prey species, some of which...
Publication Info
- Year
- 1989
- Type
- article
- Volume
- 4
- Issue
- 10
- Pages
- 293-298
- Citations
- 214
- Access
- Closed
External Links
Social Impact
Altmetric
PlumX Metrics
Social media, news, blog, policy document mentions
Citation Metrics
214
OpenAlex
2
Influential
160
CrossRef
Cite This
Peter Chesson,
Nancy J. Huntly
(1989).
Short-term instabilities and long-term community dynamics.
Trends in Ecology & Evolution
, 4
(10)
, 293-298.
https://doi.org/10.1016/0169-5347(89)90024-4
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.1016/0169-5347(89)90024-4
- PMID
- 21227372