What are characteristics of a community?
- Abundance
- Activity (dormant/active)
- Function
- Occupancy (specialist/generalist)
Within communities there are…
different subcommunities
How are subcommunities formed?
Niche Theory: a deterministic process involving the abiotic environment and biotic interactions
Neutral Theory: a stochastic process involving dispersal and drift
What do Niche Theory and Neutral Theory determine?
Community assembly: the distribution pattern of organisms in a community
What is community robustness?
emergent properties that make the community identifiable
what are some examples of properties of community robustness?
- clade and guild analysis
- redundancy
- disturbance response
- phenotypic plasticity
Define “regime” in the community stability context
A regime refers to the dominant phylotype/functional group at a given time and condition
The effects of disturbance are related to the current regime’s…
resistance and resilience to ecological change
What are the key elements of microbial communities?
- Functional pathways of nutrients and energy
- Mechanistic interactions between microbial populations, their environments, and other organisms
- Existential emergent properties of the community like system stability and diversity
- Degrees of functional redundancy
