Communities and Climate Change: An Ill-Fated Marriage?

Since the pioneering work of Clements and Gleason in the early 20th Century, ecologists have struggled to refine the notion of the biological community, especially recently, as interest in community-level response to climate change has intensified.  Attempts to quantify and predict community response to climate change may in some cases be misguided, fruitless, and meaningless because of misconceptions about what actually constitutes a community.  Nonetheless, if, and where, communities do exist, stability analysis can be employed to identify alterations to intrinsic dynamics and species interactions through which climate change may act to disrupt community integrity.