Biodiversity May Be Naturally Resilient to Moderate Human Disturbances (5 of 5) (IMAGE)

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Biodiversity May Be Naturally Resilient to Moderate Human Disturbances (5 of 5)

Caption

Each graph represents a location on the globe where a community of plants and animals was sampled on a yearly basis. The x-axis is the year of the sample, and the y-axis is the number of species that were recorded. The number of species recorded fluctuates from one sample to the next, but the analysis by Gotelli et al. shows that these numbers have a tendency to return to a central value, suggesting that communities do not drift freely, but are regulated in their species number. This material relates to a paper that appeared in the July 26, 2017, issue of Science Advances, published by AAAS. The paper, by N.J. Gotelli at University of Vermont in Burlington, V.T., and colleagues was titled, "Community-level regulation of temporal trends in biodiversity."

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[Credit: Faye Moyes]

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