Most people expect that most natural communities have multiple mechanisms of diversity maintenance in operation. Moreover, these mechanisms are likely to work on a variety of scales. How do we understand systems with such complexities? The method of quantifying mechanism strength discussed above allows us to partitioning the recovery rate into the contributions from different mechanisms and the contributions from different scales in space and time. This allows comparative contributions of the various applicable mechanisms to be assessed, facilitating understanding both in models and in nature.
