Community ecology is a confusing field, confounded by the interchangeable use of many fundamental terms.
Recently, a group of graduate students and I discussed this strange paradigm and thought we would see what people’s own interpretations were.
If you have a spare 5 minutes while drinking your morning coffee, please could you fill out this short (4 question!) poll asking you to give your definition for; ‘community’, ‘assemblage’, ‘guild’ and ‘ensemble’. It will be cool to see how people’s opinions differ!
Many thanks
James
I am most interested in understanding how different species of lizards live together. Specifically, I research the ecological mechanisms that facilitate coexistence and the subsequent evolutionary consequences. I am a post-doc in the Losos Lab at Washington University in St. Louis. Website: www.jamesTstroud.com
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Tony Gamble
Have you checked out this AmNat paper from a few years back? Simplifying the Jargon of Community Ecology: A Conceptual Approach. It seems to get at what you are looking for.
James Stroud
Hey Tony, yes absolutely. This is the paper that our reading group was discussing actually, however a few years is now nearly two decades! We are wondering how researcher and practitioner interpretations stand at the moment. I was choosing not to mention it in this post (not through ignorance!) as we are interested to see people’s gut feeling definitions at present. Thank you for taking the time to comment and highlight the paper though.