ABSTRACT
The fidelity of the translation from a living community to the remains buried at a particular site and stratigraphie level is clearly of paramount importance. Palaeoecologists have used such indices as a summary statistic for single communities, as a means of comparing communities from different places or times, and as a way of assessing environmental change from changes in community diversity over time. The first is that all indices of community diversity that are based on samples, rather than on a complete census, are likely to vary with sample size. The static community model proposes that communities shift as tightly linked assemblages. Contemporary community ecologists are still a long way from an understanding of the structural and functional organisation of communities. The realisation that a multiplicity of factors may determine community structure and species composition has undermined, to some extent, the attractively simple models of community organisation that were popular in the 1970s.
