Environmental change research is plagued by the curse of dimensionality: the number of environmental drivers and the number of communities potentially at risk are both large. This raises the pressing question if a general understanding of ecological …
Effective conservation of ecological communities requires accurate and up-to-date information about whether species are persisting or declining to extinction. The persistence of an ecological community is supported by its underlying network of …
Habitat destruction and fragmentation are principal causes of species loss. While a local population might go extinct, a metapopulation---populations inhabiting habitat patches connected by dispersal---can persist regionally by recolonizing empty …
A ubiquitous pattern in ecological systems is that more abundant species tend to be more generalist; that is, they interact with more species or can occur in more habitats. However, there is no consensus on whether generalism drives abundance (a …
The history of species immigration can dictate how species interact in local communities, thereby causing historical contingency in community assembly. Since immigration history is rarely known, these historical influences, or priority effects, pose …
Intraspecific trait variation (ITV) is a widespread feature of life, but it is an open question how ITV affects between-species coexistence. Recent theoretical studies have produced contradictory results, with ITV promoting coexistence in some models …
Competitive exclusion can be classified as deterministic or as historically contingent. While competitive exclusion is common in nature, it has remained unclear when multispecies communities formed by more than two species should be dominated by …
A central theme in ecological research is to understand how species interactions contribute to community dynamics. Species interactions are the basis of parametric (model-driven) and nonparametric (model-free) approaches in theoretical and empirical …
A central goal of ecological research has been to understand the limits on the maximum number of species that can coexist under given constraints. However, we know little about the assembly and disassembly processes under which a community can reach …
Resilience is broadly understood as the ability of a system to recover and resist perturbations coming in abundance from the environment. However, one of the main problems in assessing resilience has been linked to its measurement and the …