The tremendous diversity of species in ecological communities has motivated a century of
research into the mechanisms that maintain biodiversity. However, much of this work …

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 …

The worldwide loss of species diversity brings urgency to understanding how diverse
ecosystems maintain stability. Whereas early ecological ideas and classic observations …

Ecologists have long sought a way to explain how the remarkable biodiversity observed in
nature is maintained. On the one hand, simple models of interacting competitors cannot …

The metacommunity concept has the potential to integrate local and regional dynamics
within a general community ecology framework. To this end, the concept must move beyond …

A central assumption in most ecological models is that the interactions in a community
operate only between pairs of species. However, two species may interactively affect the …

A quantitative approach to species coexistence based on the invasibility criterion has led to
an appreciation of coexistence mechanisms in terms of stabilizing and equalizing …

Although observations of species‐rich communities have long served as a primary
motivation for research on the coexistence of competitors, the majority of our empirical and …

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

Aim More than ever, ecologists seek to understand how species are distributed and have
assembled into communities using the “filtering framework”. This framework is based on the …