Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

How To Quantify The Temporal Storage Effect Using Simulations Instead Of Math, Stephen P. Ellner, Robin E. Snyder, Peter B. Adler

Wildland Resources Faculty Publications

The storage effect, originally a theoretical hypothesis to explain how ecologically similar species could coexist by responding differently to environmental variability (Chesson & Warner, 1981; Shmida & Ellner, 1984), has developed into a core concept in community ecology (Mittelbach 2012)with empirical support from communities of prairie grasses (Adler et al., 2006), desert annual plants (Pake & Venable, 1995; Angert et al., 2009), tropical trees (Usinowicz et al., 2012) and zooplankton(Caceres, 1997). An essential step in this maturation was mathematical analysis (Chesson, 1994, 2000a) that identified the conditions required for the storage effect to help stabilize coexistence of competitors. For the …