Previous Article |
Table of Contents
| Next Article 
BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES / ECOLOGY
Impact of an extreme climatic event on community assembly
*Department of Biology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131; and Department of Biology, Furman University, Greenville, SC 29613
Contributed by James H. Brown, January 14, 2008 (received for review December 14, 2007)
Extreme climatic events are predicted to increase in frequency and magnitude, but their ecological impacts are poorly understood. Such events are large, infrequent, stochastic perturbations that can change the outcome of entrained ecological processes. Here we show how an extreme flood event affected a desert rodent community that has been monitored for 30 years. The flood (i) caused catastrophic, species-specific mortality; (ii) eliminated the incumbency advantage of previously dominant species; (iii) reset long-term population and community trends; (iv) interacted with competitive and metapopulation dynamics; and (v) resulted in rapid, wholesale reorganization of the community. This and a previous extreme rainfall event were punctuational perturbations—they caused large, rapid population- and community-level changes that were superimposed on a background of more gradual trends driven by climate and vegetation change. Captured by chance through long-term monitoring, the impacts of such large, infrequent events provide unique insights into the processes that structure ecological communities.
desert rodents | incumbency advantage | punctuational dynamics
Author contributions: K.M.T. and J.H.B. designed research; K.M.T. and J.H.B. performed research; K.M.T. analyzed data; and K.M.T. and J.H.B. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jhbrown{at}unm.edu
© 2008 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA
CiteULike 
Complore 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us 
Digg What's this?
