Microbial communities are at the heart of all ecosystems, and yet microbial community
behavior in disturbed environments remains difficult to measure and predict. Understanding …

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

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

Global concern about human impact on biological diversity has triggered an intense
research agenda on drivers and consequences of biodiversity change in parallel with …

Temporal environmental fluctuations, such as seasonality, exert strong controls on
biodiversity. While the effects of seasonality are well known, the predictability of fluctuations …

Relationships between traits of organisms and the structure of their metacommunities have
so far mainly been explored with meta‐analyses. We compared metacommunities of a wide …

The growing need for baseline data against which efforts to reduce the rate of biodiversity
loss can be judged highlights the importance of long-term datasets, some of which are as …

Identification of the majority of organisms present in human-associated microbial
communities is feasible with the advent of high throughput sequencing technology. As …

Site‐to‐site variation in species composition (β‐diversity) generally increases from low‐to
high‐diversity regions. Although biogeographical differences in community assembly …

Ecology Letters (2009) 12: 1405–1419 Abstract The global decline of biodiversity caused by
human domination of ecosystems worldwide is supposed to alter important process rates …