Understanding how communities of living organisms assemble has been a central question
in ecology since the early days of the discipline. Disentangling the different processes …

Summary 1 Analyzing the phylogenetic structure of natural communities may illuminate the
processes governing the assembly and coexistence of species. For instance, an association …

Understanding the processes that are driving variation of natural microbial communities
across space or time is a major challenge for ecologists. Environmental conditions strongly …

Co‐occurrence methods are increasingly utilized in ecology to infer networks of species
interactions where detailed knowledge based on empirical studies is difficult to obtain. Their …

Patterns of phylogenetic relatedness within communities have been widely used to infer the
importance of different ecological and evolutionary processes during community assembly …

Nestedness is a common biogeographic pattern in which small communities form proper
subsets of large communities. However, the detection of nestedness in binary presence …

After much debate, there is an emerging consensus that the composition of many ecological
communities is determined both by species traits, as proposed by niche theory, as well as by …

This review identifies several important challenges in null model testing in ecology: 1)
develo** randomization algorithms that generate appropriate patterns for a specified null …

The influence of negative species interactions has dominated much of the literature on
community assembly rules. Patterns of negative covariation among species are typically …

The neutral model posits that random variation in extinction and speciation events, coupled
with limited dispersal, can account for many community properties, including the relative …