Q.What characteristics make a community stable?
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →A stable community is one that remains largely unchanged in species composition and structure over time, resists disturbances (or recovers quickly from them), and shows little year-to-year variation in productivity — these are the three core characteristics named in the NCERT textbook.
The NCERT textbook highlights three key characteristics that define a stable community:
- Constancy in productivity — the community should not show too much variation in its biological productivity from year to year.
- Resistance or resilience to disturbance — the community must be either resistant (able to stay essentially unchanged when faced with a perturbation) or resilient (able to return to its original state fairly quickly after being disturbed).
- Resistance to invasion by alien species — a stable community does not allow outside species to easily establish themselves.
A community does not need all three traits in equal measure to be considered reasonably stable.
The textbook also makes an important related point: stability is not automatically guaranteed by species richness alone. David Tilman's long-term outdoor-plot experiments gave this some support — plots with more species showed less year-to-year variation in total biomass, and greater diversity also contributed to higher productivity in his experiments. But the textbook is careful to say we do not fully understand exactly how species richness contributes to a community's stability. …
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