Soil microorganisms are clearly a key component of both natural and managed ecosystems.
Despite the challenges of surviving in soil, a gram of soil can contain thousands of individual …

Evidence is increasing for positive effects of α-diversity on ecosystem functioning. We
highlight here the crucial role of β-diversity–a hitherto underexplored facet of biodiversity–for …

Three metrics of species diversity–species richness, the Shannon index and the Simpson
index–are still widely used in ecology, despite decades of valid critiques leveled against …

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

Scaling laws underpin unifying theories of biodiversity and are among the most predictively
powerful relationships in biology. However, scaling laws developed for plants and animals …

A plethora of different theories, models, and concepts make up the field of community
ecology. Amid this vast body of work, is it possible to build one general theory of ecological …

Quantifying the abundance of species is essential to ecology, evolution, and conservation.
The distribution of species abundances is fundamental to numerous longstanding questions …