Construct · 1 fields · 3 citations

keystone species: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

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keystonespecies1 CONSTRUCTKeystone speciesPAINE · KEYSTONE SPECIES

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Ecology

A species whose community-wide effect is disproportionately large relative to its abundance

Robert T. Paine coined the term keystone species in a 1969 note in The American Naturalist, naming it after the wedge-shaped keystone of an arch, the single stone whose removal lets the whole structure collapse. The idea grew from his 1966 field experiments on the rocky shores of Washington State, where removing one predator, the ochre sea star Pisaster ochraceus, let its mussel prey overrun the shore and drove local diversity down from about fifteen species to eight. A keystone species is one whose effect on the structure and diversity of its ecological community is far larger than its own abundance would suggest, so that losing it reshapes the community out of proportion to the biomass removed. Power and colleagues sharpened this in 1996, defining a keystone by that disproportion between impact and abundance and separating it from a merely dominant species that is influential simply because it is common. The construct is a landmark in community ecology because it names particular species, often predators, whose presence or absence governs which other species can coexist.[1][2][3]

Unit
A species classified by the ratio of its community-wide impact to its abundance
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Identified by experimental removal or exclusion and by comparing a species' community-wide impact against its biomass or numerical abundance

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Nearby constructs

trophic cascade1 fields · 3 citationsanchor · a standalone constructecosystem3 fields · 5 citationsjingle · one word, three constructsbiodiversity3 names · 4 citationsjangle · one idea, four rival measures

References

  1. Paine, R. T. (1969). A note on trophic complexity and community stability. The American Naturalist, 103(929), 91–93. https://doi.org/10.1086/282586
  2. Paine, R. T. (1966). Food web complexity and species diversity. The American Naturalist, 100(910), 65–75. https://doi.org/10.1086/282400
  3. Power, M. E., Tilman, D., Estes, J. A., Menge, B. A., Bond, W. J., Mills, L. S., Daily, G., Castilla, J. C., Lubchenco, J., & Paine, R. T. (1996). Challenges in the quest for keystones. BioScience, 46(8), 609–620. https://doi.org/10.2307/1312990

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