SYMP 1-6
The many lives of community ecology

Monday, August 5, 2013: 3:40 PM
M100EF, Minneapolis Convention Center
Gary G. Mittelbach, W. K. Kellogg Biological Station, Michigan State University, Hickory Corners, MI
Background/Question/Methods

Community ecology’s turbulent history includes a number of “near-death” experiences, one of which (the great null-model debate) coincided with the publication of Robert McIntosh’s book on The Background of Ecology: Concept and Theory in 1985. The years since McIntosh’s book have witnessed many more ups and down in the maturation on community ecology, as well-known ecologists have variously decried community ecology as a hopeless “mess” of contingency (Lawton 1999) or called for the “disintegration of the ecological community“ altogether (Ricklefs 2008). Today, however, the field is enjoying a hearty revival, in part because of these constructive criticisms. Current students of community ecology can join Mark Twain in declaring that “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”.  

Results/Conclusions

In my talk, I will briefly review the history of community ecology and show how the field has undergone a transformation in recent years, form a discipline largely focused on process occurring within local communities, to a discipline encompassing a much richer domain of study.  The recognition that local communities bear the footprint of historical and regional process is an important insight that grew out of the narrow, local community focus of the 1960’s and 1970’s, which MacIntosh summarizes in his book and more so in his insightful 1987 Annual Review article.  Interestingly, as McIntosh noted, Robert McArthur anticipated this paradigm shift in community ecology, but he died too young to be a part of it.  Simply put, we now recognize that few communities exist in isolation.  Instead, the diversity of species within a community is a product of their biotic and abiotic interactions (i.e., species sorting, along with drift), the dispersal of species between communities, and the composition of the regional species pool (a function of biogeography and evolutionary history).  Therefore, we need to consider the processes that regulate diversity at a local scale as well as the process that link populations and communities into metapopulations and metacommunities, and the process that ultimately generate diversity a regional scales. This is a tall order, but also an exciting opportunity for the current generation of community ecologists.