An isoclinal approach to the comparative statics of biological communities

An understanding of the comparative statics of biological communities is important both as a means of explaining the long-term effects of changes in environmental conditions, and as a framework for viewing community time trajectories. A general formulation of community dynamics is presented here which, given full information about a particular community's dynamic behavior, describes the impact of a change in environmental conditions on the community steady state. However, since such full information is often lacking in studies of biological communities, various approaches to partial information analysis of comparative statics are presented and compared, including a generalized protocol for isocline analysis. The suggested isocline protocol is shown to be a useful tool for both full and partial information analyses, as well as for both general and partial equilibrium studies.