Small Mammal Community Dynamics in Forest Ecosystems
Summary
Small mammals, including rodents and insectivores, play central roles in forest ecosystems as seed dispersers, prey for higher trophic levels and ecosystem engineers affecting nutrient cycling and vegetation structure. Community dynamics among these taxa are shaped by a complex interplay of bottom-up drivers such as resource availability, habitat heterogeneity and landscape configuration, and top-down forces including predation and interspecific competition. Temporal patterns such as multi-annual population cycles and pulse events interact with spatial processes like colonisation, extinction and dispersal across successional and fragmented forest patches. Deterministic factors (for example niche differentiation and density-dependent regulation) often combine with stochastic influences (random colonisation and local extinction) to assemble and maintain species assemblages. Anthropogenic pressures—forest management, logging, grazing and land-use change—alter habitat structure and resource distributions, thereby reshaping small mammal community composition and function. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for biodiversity conservation, sustainable forest management and restoration, since small mammals mediate key ecosystem services and may signal early changes in forest health under global change.
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Small Mammal Community Dynamics in Forest Ecosystems publication trend
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Technical terms
Community assembly: The process by which species colonise, interact and persist to form a local ecological community.
Density dependence: Regulation of population growth by factors whose effects intensify as population density increases.
Deterministic processes: Non-random ecological drivers such as competition or niche differentiation that influence community structure.
Stochastic processes: Random events such as chance colonisation and local extinction that affect community composition.
Temporal autocorrelation: Persistence of population or abundance patterns across successive time intervals due to delayed regulatory feedbacks.
References
- Functional and numerical responses of shrews to competition vary with mouse density. PLOS ONE (2018).
- Temporal dynamics in animal community assembly during post-logging succession in boreal forest. PLOS ONE (2018).
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