The global biodiversity crisis concerns not only unprecedented loss of species within
communities, but also related consequences for ecosystem function. Community ecology …

Metacommunity theory has advanced understanding of how spatial dynamics and local
interactions shape community structure and biodiversity. Here, we review empirical …

Emergence of the metacommunity concept has made a substantial contribution to better
understanding of the community composition and dynamics in a regional context. However …

Background The central thesis of plant ecology is that climate determines the global
distribution of vegetation. Within a vegetation type, however, finer‐scale environmental …

A central tenet of ecology and biogeography is that the broad outlines of species ranges are
determined by climate, whereas the effects of biotic interactions are manifested at local …

Table of Contents: 1. Metacommunities: a framework for large-scale community
ecology/Marcel Holyoak, Mathew A. Leibold, Nicolas M. Mouquet, Robert D. Holt and Martha …

Ecology Letters (2011) 14: 973–984 Abstract The concept of alternative stable states has
long been a dominant framework for studying the influence of historical contingency in …

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 …

The competition–colonization trade‐off model is often used to explain the coexistence of
species. Yet its applicability has been severely criticized, mainly because the original model …