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FOREWORD
First published more than 60 years ago, this work by Gusztáv Szelényi has
just recently been translated into English and its historical significance can
now be appreciated by non-Hungarian speakers. Szelényi was concerned
with identifying animal “communities.” While presently we consider a
community to be an assemblage of species that occur in a specific place at
a specific time, Szelényi was concerned about how to identify animal
“communities” as a holistic concept without reference to a specific place or
time. This is a terribly challenging problematic, as first of all, it is not entirely
clear that an animal “community” exists with characteristics that are more
than the sum of the parts, and second of all, as we and Szelényi recognize,
these "communities" vary both in space and time.
His solution to this problematic was to define a community to be one that
is tied together by the trophic relations of its member populations. In this
way, he distinguished his approach from faunistics, which is merely a list of
the species (and sometimes their relative abundances) that occur in a place
and time. From a modern perspective, I believe that he developed Eltons
(1927) niche concept (the role of a species in its community). He suggested
that the "community" is the composite of these roles, focusing primarily on
the trophic interactions among the populations in the “community”. This
shift in perspective from a view that the role is a species property (in the
Eltonian niche) to the view that the roles are the whole community was
necessary to justify that the “community” was more than just the assemblage
of species occurring in the same place at the same time. Specifically, in his
view, trophic interactions are relational, and depend on the other populations
that are available to be eaten or to eat. That is, they are not a property of the
species but a property of the population that depends on the other populations
present.
His focus on trophic interactions with applications to cultivated habitats
led him to foreshadow the development of several modern concepts associated
with communities and food webs (Layman et al. 2015).
Unlike the phytosociologists, who suggested that there were plant “societies”,
such as the beech-maple forest, the short-grass prairie, etc, Szelényi did not
believe that animal “communities” converged to the same species composition