The majority of humanity now lives in cities or towns, with this proportion expected to
continue increasing for the foreseeable future. As novel ecosystems, urban areas offer an …

Understanding the processes sha** biological communities under multiple disturbances
is a core challenge in ecology and conservation science. Traditionally, ecologists have …

The leaf economics spectrum (LES) provides a useful framework for examining species
strategies as shaped by their evolutionary history. However, that spectrum, as originally …

Owing to the conceptual complexity of functional diversity (FD), a multitude of different
methods are available for measuring it, with most being operational at only a small range of …

Predicting which species will occur together in the future, and where, remains one of the
greatest challenges in ecology, and requires a sound understanding of how the abiotic and …

Ecologists seek general explanations for the dramatic variation in species abundances in
space and time. An increasingly popular solution is to predict species distributions …

The hypotheses that have been derived to explain the distribution, abundance, dynamics,
and diversity of species are typically tested using data matrices containing the names and …

Plants and vegetation play a critical—but largely unpredictable—role in global
environmental changes due to the multitude of contributing processes at widely different …

Generalizing the effect of traits on performance across species may be achievable if traits
explain variation in population fitness. However, testing relationships between traits and vital …

Manipulating community assemblages to achieve functional targets is a key component of
restoring degraded ecosystems. The response‐and‐effect trait framework provides a …