Local Temporal and Spatial Structure

Community structure is defined by the organization of its parts. This paper describes plant species, but local temporal and spatial structure can refer to any definable organizational elements in the community. Since science is essentially a search for repeatable patterns, the identification of predictable structural elements must form the basis for explanations of function. For example, California’s grassland communities most commonly are described in terms of relative cover of the dominant species. Cover is traditionally emphasized because of a presumed functional relationship to ecological dominance. Any functional explanation depends on structural descriptions, a relationship infrequently acknowledged (Whittaker 1970), although resource partitioning is a fundamental tenet of ecological theory.