Forest Sciences Commons^™

A Historical Contingency Hypothesis For Population Ecology, Sarah Hoy, Rolf O. Peterson, John A. Vucetich

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 2

Assessments of historical contingency have advanced our understanding of adaptive radiation and community ecology, but little attention has been given to assessing the importance of historical contingency in population ecology. An obstacle has been the unmet need to conceptualize historical contingencies for populations in a manner that allows for their explanatory power to be assessed and quantified so that it can be directly compared with the explanatory power of statistical models representing other hypotheses or theory-based explanations. Here we conceptualize historical contingencies as a series of random events characterized by (1) significant legacy effects that are comparable in length to …