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

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 …

Unraveling the drivers controlling community assembly is a central issue in ecology.
Although it is generally accepted that selection, dispersal, diversification and drift are major …

Soil communities are intricately linked to ecosystem functioning, and a predictive
understanding of how communities assemble in response to environmental change is of …

Understanding the community assembly mechanisms controlling biodiversity patterns is a
central issue in ecology. Although it is generally accepted that both deterministic and …

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

A growing body of evidence suggests that microbial α-diversity (local species richness) may
have positive effects on ecosystem function. However, less attention has been paid to β …

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 …

Community assembly describes how different ecological processes shape microbial
community composition and structure. How environmental factors impact community …

Ecological succession and the balance between stochastic and deterministic processes are
two major themes within microbial ecology, but these conceptual domains have mostly …