The oceans appear ideal for biodiversity—they have unlimited water, a large area, are well
connected, have less extreme temperatures than on land, and contain more phyla and …

We give a comprehensive review of Chesson's coexistence theory, summarizing, for the first
time, all its fundamental details in one single document. Our goal is for both theoretical and …

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

Abstract Theory predicts that intraspecific competition should be stronger than interspecific
competition for any pair of stably coexisting species, yet previous literature reviews found …

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 …

In the past two decades, a large number of studies have investigated the relationship
between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, most of which focussed on a limited set of …

Understanding the processes maintaining species diversity is a central problem in ecology,
with implications for the conservation and management of ecosystems. Although biologists …

Understanding the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning has been a
core ecological research topic over the past decades. Although a key hypothesis is that the …

Rarity has been a central topic for conservation and evolutionary biologists aiming to
determine the species characteristics that cause extinction risk. More recently, beyond the …

The J anzen–C onnell hypothesis proposes that specialist natural enemies, such as
herbivores and pathogens, maintain diversity in plant communities by reducing survival …