The Diversity–disturbance Relationship: Is It Generally Strong and Peaked?

Abstract

The contemporary literature accepts that disturbance strongly influences patterns of species diversity, and that the relationship is peaked, with a maximum at intermediate levels of disturbance. We tested this hypothesis using a compilation of published species diversity–disturbance relationships that were gleaned from a literature search of papers published from 1985 through 1996 and from references therein. We identified 116 species richness–, 53 diversity–, and 28 evenness–disturbance relationships in the literature, which we grouped according to shape of relationship (nonsignificant, peaked, negative monotonic, positive monotonic, or U‐shaped). We tested the relationships between the strength and shapes of these relationships and attributes of the community, disturbance, and sampling and study design. Nonsignificant relationships were the most common, comprising 35% of richness, 28% of diversity, and 50% of evenness studies. Peaked responses were reported in only 16% of richness, 19% of diversity, and 11% of evenness cases. Explained variation in the three measures of diversity was variable among studies but averaged ∼50%. It was higher when few samples and few disturbance levels were examined and when organisms within the samples were not exhaustively censused, suggesting that procedural artifact contributes to these relationships. Explained variation was also higher in studies in which disturbance was measured as a gradient of time passed since the last disturbance (meanr2 = 61%), vs. studies of spatial variation in richness (meanr2 = 42%). Peaked richness relationships had the greatest odds of being observed when sampled area and actual evapotranspiration were small, when disturbances were natural rather than anthropogenic in origin, and when few disturbance levels were examined. Thus, on average, diversity–disturbance relationships do not have consistently highr2 and are not as consistently peaked as the contemporary consensus would suggest.

Microbial Succession in the Gut: Directional Trends of Taxonomic and Functional Change in a Birth Cohort of Spanish Infants

“…Our observation that solid food introduction is followed by a purge in rare taxa is consistent with the idea that fewer species will persist in the face of intense disturbances [72]. In the 7-months infant, the genera that thrived in the milk-adapted microbiota - i. e. , Bifidobacterium and Bacteroides - continue to dominate, with the latter genus being now the most abundant in a majority of individuals.…”

Effects of cattle grazing on small mammal communities in the Hulunber meadow steppe

“…Our experimental design involves multiple levels of disturbance (four levels of grazing intensity) and thus enables us to assess the validity of the intermediate disturbance hypothesis (the IDH), a classic ecological theory but associated with long-term debates (Mackey & Currie, 2001). The IDH predicts that communities under intermediate intensities or frequencies of disturbance should possess higher species diversity than that under low levels of disturbance or severe disturbance (Connell, 1978).…”

Disturbance Increases Microbial Community Diversity and Production in Marine Sediments

“…Nevertheless, recent studies have refuted the idea of a positive relationship between disturbance and community diversity. A survey of empirical studies reported that non-significant relationships were the most common (Mackey and Currie, 2001), and a recent paper proposed, based on both empirical and theoretical grounds, that the IDH should be abandoned (Fox, 2013). For microorganisms, soil experiments showed that diversity declined with increasing disturbance frequencies, (Kim et al, 2013) and a negative diversity-disturbance relationship was also observed in natural marine sediments (Boer et al, 2009).…”