COMMUNITY DYNAMICS
COMMUNITY STRUCTURE
A community is a group of populations of plants and animals in a given place or an ecological unit used in a broad sense to include groups of various sizes and degrees of integration. Community structure can refer to the physical structure or to the biological structure of a community. The physical structure is what one sees when looking at a community. For example, in a forest, a primary structure is imposed by large trees, and a secondary structure is the understory trees and shrubs. Biological structure involves species composition and abundance, temporal changes in communities, and relationships between species in a community.