BIOL 241 Chapter 47: Chapter 47 Notes
8 Jul 2017
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Document Summary
A community is the set of all populations found in a given place. This de nition seems straightforward, but it raises some large questions about the nature of communities. Two different views were proposed nearly a century ago, and ecologists have debated their merits ever since. Frederic clements, a prominent american ecologist of the early twentieth century, likened plant communities to a superorganism in which species interact strongly and predictably, like the organs within a body. In contrast, henry gleason, his contemporary, viewed plant communities as simply the products of species" acting individually in time and space. Not surprisingly, research inspired by their disagreement suggests that the plants in most communities lie somewhere between these extremes. Populations in a community, whether a salt marsh, mountaintop, or desert, are tied together by the various interactions that secure their spot in a food web (chapter 25), as well as by their physical location.
