Community ecology is often perceived as a mess, given the seemingly vast number of
processes that can underlie the many patterns of interest, and the apparent uniqueness of …

Ecologists often view community assembly as a process involving the dispersal of species
from a static regional species pool followed by environmental filtering to establish the local …

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 …

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

According to the invasion criterion, stable coexistence requires that all species in a
community increase in abundance when rare, which occurs when stabilizing mechanisms …

Ecological neutral theory has elicited strong opinions in recent years. Here, we review these
opinions and strip away some unfortunate problems with semantics to reveal three major …

At a glance, most species seem adapted to the environment in which they live. Yet species
relentlessly evolve, and populations within species evolve in different ways. Evolution, as it …

For two competing species, intraspecific competition must exceed interspecific competition
for coexistence. To generalize this well-known criterion to multiple competing species, one …

A major challenge in ecology is to understand how the millions of species on Earth are
organized into biological communities. Mechanisms promoting coexistence are one such …