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OCR
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
