Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis - History

History

David Wilkinson gives a thorough history of the hypothesis in his paper titled, ‘The disturbing history of the intermediate disturbance’ . In this paper, he explains that the idea of disturbance relating to species richness can be traced back to the 1940’s in Eggeling 1947, Watt 1947, and Tansley 1949 . Though studies supporting the hypothesis began in the 1960’s, the first concrete statements of the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis didn’t occur until the 1970’s . The hypothesis was initially illustrated using what has been referred to as a “hump-backed model”, which graphed the proposed relationship between diversity and disturbance . This graph appeared first in Grime’s ‘Competitive exclusion in herbaceous vegetation’ where it was used to show the relationship between species density and both environmental stress and intensity of management. The graph appears again in Horn’s ‘Markovian properties of forest succession’ and Conell’s ‘The influence of interspecific competition and other factors on the distribution of the barnacle.’ Though Grime was the first to provide a model for the relationship and Horn was the first to explicitly state the hypothesis, Connell is generally cited in text books and journals as the founder of the hypothesis.

The hypothesis caused concern among the marine science community because of the discrepancy with the 1976 Competition/Predation/Disturbance model proposed by Menge and Sutherland . In this model, low disturbance influences high predation and high disturbance creates low predation, causing competitive exclusion to take place. Menge & Sutherland formulated a new model, one that incorporated Connell's ideas in a two part graph published in the American Naturalist (1987) . This model proposes that predation, competition, and disturbance are all responsible for shaping the diversity of a community under certain circumstances.

Research regarding the effects of intermediate disturbance is ongoing. In one study, dry and tropical forest regions were compared to determine how the effects of IDH change due to varying climate . More recently, the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis has been examined in marine and freshwater ecosystems and protist microcosms .