Journal
BIOLOGY LETTERS
Volume 8, Issue 5, Pages 768-771Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2012.0282
Keywords
disturbance; microcosm; Pseudomonas fluorescens; intermediate disturbance hypothesis
Categories
Funding
- European Research Council grant
- National Science Foundation grant [DEB-0815373]
- Direct For Biological Sciences
- Division Of Environmental Biology [0815373] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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An influential ecological theory, the intermediate disturbance hypothesis (IDH), predicts that intermediate levels of disturbance will maximize species diversity. Empirical studies, however, have described a wide variety of diversity-disturbance relationships (DDRs). Using experimental populations of microbes, we show that the form of the DDR depends on an interaction between disturbance frequency and intensity. We find that diversity shows a monotonically increasing, unimodal or flat relationship with disturbance, depending on the values of the disturbance aspects considered. These results confirm recent theoretical predictions, and potentially reconcile the conflicting body of empirical evidence on DDRs.
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