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

In the last two decades, interest in species distribution models (SDMs) of plants and animals
has grown dramatically. Recent advances in SDMs allow us to potentially forecast …

Metabolism provides a basis for using first principles of physics, chemistry, and biology to
link the biology of individual organisms to the ecology of populations, communities, and …

The metacommunity concept is an important way to think about linkages between different
spatial scales in ecology. Here we review current understanding about this concept. We first …

Why do species live where they live? What determines the abundance and diversity of
species in a given area? What role do species play in the functioning of entire ecosystems …

Recently, microbiologists have established the existence of biogeographic patterns among a
wide range of microorganisms. The focus of the field is now shifting to identifying the …

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

Deterministic theories in community ecology suggest that local, niche-based processes,
such as environmental filtering, biotic interactions and interspecific trade-offs largely …

The abundance of individuals in microbial species is so large that dispersal is rarely (if ever)
restricted by geographical barriers. This “ubiquitous” dispersal requires an alternative view …

Stochastic niche theory resolves many of the differences between neutral theory and
classical tradeoff-based niche theories of resource competition and community structure. In …