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Science 22 January 1999:
Vol. 283. no. 5401, pp. 495 - 496
DOI: 10.1126/science.283.5401.495
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Perspectives

Also see the archival list of Science's Compass: Enhanced Perspectives

ECOLOGY:
Enhanced: Diversity by Default

David Tilman

Why doesn't survival of the fittest seem to apply when many plants coexist? A report in this issue of Science (Hubbell et al.) on tropical forests together with work from other habitats is converging on one explanation of this phenomenon--the recruitment limitation hypothesis. Simply put, this explanation states that stable heterogeneous populations of various types of plants coexist because--often by chance--the more successful competitors of the region do not happen to be locally present.

The author is in the Department of Ecology, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108, USA. E-mail: tilman{at}lter.umn.edu

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Metapopulation dynamics and spatial heterogeneity in cancer.
I. Gonzalez-Garcia, R. V. Sole, and J. Costa (2002)
PNAS 99, 13085-13089
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