Print PageUnderstanding the relationship between disturbance regimes and species diversity has been of central interest to ecologists for decades. For example, the intermediate disturbance hypothesis (IDH) proposes that diversity will be highest at intermediate levels of disturbance. While peaked or ‘hump-shaped’ diversity-disturbance relationships (DDR) have been documented in nature, increasing, decreasing and U-shaped DDRs have been reported as well. Here, we begin to theoretically unify these diverse empirical findings by showing how a single simple model can generate several different DDRs, depending on the aspect of disturbance that is considered.
Results/Conclusions
Though aspects of disturbance such as frequency, intensity, and extent have been studied before, we provide novel theoretical results that explain how different aspects can interact to influence competitive outcomes. Moreover, we elucidate the diversity-maintaining mechanism underlying our results. Our framework for quantifying mechanisms of coexistence based upon species’ life-history traits and disturbance regime parameters can potentially be applied to a variety of communities, and we give examples of models for annual plant and deep-sea hydrothermal vent communities. Our findings have the potential to reconcile apparently conflicting empirical results on the effects of disturbance on diversity.
