Table 1.
Common terms for disturbances, community responses, and community outcomes.
| DISTURBANCE TERMS | |
| Disturbance | A causal event that causes a discrete change in the physical or chemical environment that has anticipated effects on a community (Rykiel, 1985; Glasby and Underwood, 1996) |
| Press disturbance | A continuous disturbance that may arise sharply but reaches a constant level that is maintained over a long period of time (Lake, 2000) |
| Pulse disturbance | A short-term, often intense disturbance that rapidly decreases in severity over a short period of time (Lake, 2000) |
| COMMUNITY TERMS | |
| Community | An assemblage of microorganisms that live in the same locality and potentially interact with each other or with the environment (Konopka, 2009) |
| Metacommunity | Within a regional landscape, a set of local communities whose members are linked by dispersal (Wilson, 1992; Logue et al., 2011) |
| COMMUNITY RESPONSE TERMS | |
| Stability | The tendency of a community to return to a mean condition after a disturbance (Pimm, 1984); includes the components of resistance and resilience |
| Ecological stability can be measured in many ways, including the persistence of populations through time, constancy of ecological attributes through time, resistance to a disturbance, or resilience after a disturbance (Worm and Duffy, 2003) | |
| Resistance | The degree to which a community withstands change in the face of disturbance (Pimm, 1984; Allison and Martiny, 2008). Inverse of sensitivity |
| Sensitivity | The degree to which a community changes in response to disturbance, the inverse of resistance |
| Resilience | The rate at which a microbial community returns to its original composition after being disturbed (Allison and Martiny, 2008). Commonly referred to as community recovery. Inverse of return time |
| COMMUNITY OUTCOMES | |
| Stable state | A condition where a community returns to its original composition or function following a disturbance (Beisner et al., 2003). Also known as community equilibrium or an attractor |
| Alternative stable state | A condition where a community moves to a different but stable composition or function following a disturbance. One of multiple, non-transitory stable states in which a community can exist (Beisner et al., 2003) |
| Regime shift | A large change in community composition arising from a shift between alternative stable states (Scheffer and Carpenter, 2003) |