Gonzalez Andrew, Holt Robert D
Fonctionnement et Evolution des Systèmes Ecologiques, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 46 Rue d'Ulm, F-75230 Paris Cedex 05, France.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2002 Nov 12;99(23):14872-7. doi: 10.1073/pnas.232589299. Epub 2002 Nov 4.
Ecological communities are open to the immigration of individuals and are variable through time. In open habitats immigration may permit populations of a species to persist locally even though local biotic and abiotic processes tend to exclude such "sink" populations. A general model for a sink population reveals that autocorrelated environmental variation can dramatically inflate local abundance and that such populations display a characteristic "outbreak" pattern. An experimental protist microcosm exhibits these predicted effects. Because the many ecological and environmental processes that set the rate of exclusion are typically autocorrelated, these theoretical and empirical results have broad implications for our understanding of community structure and highlight a previously unsuspected potential effect of anthropogenic climate change.
生态群落对个体的迁入是开放的，并且随时间变化。在开放生境中，即使当地的生物和非生物过程往往会排除这类“汇”种群，但迁入可能使一个物种的种群在当地持续存在。一个关于汇种群的通用模型表明，自相关的环境变化会显著提高当地的丰度，并且这类种群呈现出一种典型的“爆发”模式。一个实验性原生生物微观世界展现了这些预测效应。由于许多决定排除速率的生态和环境过程通常是自相关的，这些理论和实证结果对我们理解群落结构具有广泛的意义，并凸显了人为气候变化一个此前未被怀疑的潜在影响。
