Ecosystems are dynamic systems with complex responses to environmental variation. In
response to pervasive stressors of changing climate and disturbance regimes, many …

Understanding the mechanisms controlling community diversity, functions, succession, and
biogeography is a central, but poorly understood, topic in ecology, particularly in microbial …

Abstract As the United Nations develops a post-2020 global biodiversity framework for the
Convention on Biological Diversity, attention is focusing on how new goals and targets for …

Metacommunity ecology links smaller-scale processes that have been the provenance of
population and community ecology—such as birth-death processes, species interactions …

The order and timing of species immigration during community assembly can affect species
abundances at multiple spatial scales. Known as priority effects, these effects cause …

Stochastic processes can play an important role in microbial community assembly. Dispersal
limitation is one process that can increase stochasticity and obscure relationships between …

Background The central thesis of plant ecology is that climate determines the global
distribution of vegetation. Within a vegetation type, however, finer‐scale environmental …

Aim More than ever, ecologists seek to understand how species are distributed and have
assembled into communities using the “filtering framework”. This framework is based on the …

Understanding the origins of biodiversity has been an aspiration since the days of early
naturalists. The immense complexity of ecological, evolutionary, and spatial processes …

Co‐existence theories fail to adequately explain observed community patterns (diversity and
composition) because they mainly address local extinctions. For a more complete …