Spatial organization of animal communities: Empirical and theoretical concepts

The essence of relevant approaches to the study of principles of animal community organization is in abstracting from the real territory and performing analysis in a factor (virtual) space, with typological presentation of the results. In this context, spatial heterogeneity of the fauna, its internal regularities, and dependence on environmental factors are discussed. In fact, the existing concepts concerning the spatial organization of the fauna contain all essential components of a theory. In this study, the assumptions, postulates, and statements of the theory of regime—resource organization of animal communities are formulated, and the theory is formalized in statistical models. The models are verified through prognosis (i.e., the prognostic capacity of the formalized models reflecting the proposed theory is estimated). Taking into account fairly strong correlations between the calculated and factual data, the results of verification of theoretical ideas concerning heterogeneity of the fauna may be considered satisfactory.