Publication Abstract

Under most conditions one of a variety of factors, including evolutionary history, environmental variability and complexity or disturbance, can assume a dominant role in regulating the diversity and structure of faunal communities. Diversity is correlated with disturbance on many different scales, with some positive and some negative correlations. Different types of disturbance cause responses at different levels of organisation. Physical disturbance usually alters spatial heterogeneity and structural complexity in the environment, so that changes in diversity may reflect exposure to varying levels of disturbance. Biological disturbance influences the behaviour of organisms and their population structure. Many man-induced chemical disturbances, such as pollution, lead to special physiological adaptations of the affected organisms. Differential responses of assemblages to various types of disturbance can rarely be demonstrated by field survey data alone because of the broad spectrum of environmental variation in all systems. Additionally, disturbance events are usually correlated with changes of other parameters which may influence diversity and mark the true response of communities. This problem can be overcome by the design of appropriate experiments and field surveys. Whilst short-term, small-scale laboratory and field experiments quantify the immediate effect of perturbation, larger-scale field surveys offer the capacity to examine the prolonged effect of an impact and its manifestation over several generations. Using meiofauna case studies as example, this presentation demonstrates how results from various study approaches, in isolation as well as in combination, can help to gain wider insights into the response of communities to environmental change.