Niche theory and community organization

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Abstract
The ecological niche concept was developed by animal ecologists, and the concept has only recently been applied to plant population studies to any great degree. Many different aspects of the niche concept have been explored to determine the manner in which plant communities are organized. In one approach, interest in understanding the response of plant populations to fine-scale heterogeneity has given plant ecologists an organism-oriented view of the plant community. One advantage of the concepts that are presently being developed in plant ecological studies is that individual-plant models can be used to scale the understanding of microscale plant phenomena to larger spatial scales. In this paper, we present two examples that show how these niche concepts can be incorporated into dynamic models that can be used to generate landscape-scale patterns.

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