TY - JOUR
AU - Antonovics, J.
AB - Most studies of plant communities attempt to correlate species distributions with environmental variables1–5. Such studies provide some insight into the contribution of density-independent variables to plant community structure1–6 but contribute little to our understanding of niche relationships and levels of competitive interactions among coexisting species. In contrast, experimental perturbation studies where species are added or removed, have the advantage of testing specific biotic interactions among community components in natural conditions. Such approaches, for example, have proved valuable in elucidating the role of competition and predation in structuring sessile marine invertebrate communities7–9. Despite an empirical approach championed by Clemments10, few terrestrial plant ecologists have conducted analogous perturbation–response studies11–14. We have performed perturbation experiments on a set of closely adjacent coastal plant communities. Our observations indicate that species interactions are important in structuring these plant communities, and that these interactions may be specific or diffuse, reciprocal or non-reciprocal and may vary in different environments. We suggest a general approach to quantifying species interactions, derived from perturbation experiments, as a framework for generalizations and comparisons of biotic interactions in natural communities.
TI - Analysis of interspecific interactions in a coastal plant community—a perturbation approach
JF - Nature
DO - 10.1038/298557a0
DA - 1982-08-05
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/springer-journals/analysis-of-interspecific-interactions-in-a-coastal-plant-community-a-C2Ws0OT2J6
SP - 557
EP - 560
VL - 298
IS - 5874
DP - DeepDyve
ER -