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

Metacommunity ecology addresses the situation where sets of local communities are
connected by the dispersal of a number of potentially interacting species. Aquatic systems …

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

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 …

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

A central current debate in community ecology concerns the relative importance of
deterministic versus stochastic processes underlying community structure. However, the …

The continuum hypothesis states that both deterministic and stochastic processes contribute
to the assembly of ecological communities. However, the contextual dependency of these …

β‐diversity represents the compositional variation among communities from site‐to‐site,
linking local (α‐diversity) and regional (γ‐diversity). Researchers often desire to compare …

Despite its supreme importance and the threat of its global crash, biodiversity remains poorly
understood both empirically and theoretically. This ambitious book presents a new, general …

Net primary productivity is a principal driver of biodiversity; large-scale regions with higher
productivity generally have more species. This pattern emerges because β-diversity …