ABSTRACT
The community is an assemblage of species populations that occur together in the same place at the same time. It is the biological part of an ecosystem, as distinct from its physical environment. The community has interesting and complex properties arising from the interaction between species. A community can be characterized by its diversity which is a function of the number of different species it contains and their abundance. The vegetation of one area differs in characteristic ways from that of another area allowing communities to be distinguished subjectively, for example on the basis of dominance by particular tree species. Species can be categorized into guilds, which are groupings of species that occupy similar niches; for example, insects feeding on broad-leaved trees form one guild. Complexity is a function of the number of interconnections among community elements. Complexity increases as the number of interacting species in the community increases.
