Approximately 25 years ago, ecologists became increasingly interested in the question of
whether ongoing biodiversity loss matters for the functioning of ecosystems. As such, a new …

Although research on the role of competitive interactions during community assembly began
decades ago, a recent revival of interest has led to new discoveries and research …

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

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 …

Species diversity is a major determinant of ecosystem productivity, stability, invasibility, and
nutrient dynamics. Hundreds of studies spanning terrestrial, aquatic, and marine ecosystems …

Global losses of biodiversity have galvanised efforts to understand how changes to
communities affect ecological processes, including transmission of infectious pathogens …

Concern about the functional consequences of unprecedented loss in biodiversity has
prompted biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (BEF) research to become one of the most …

Alien species are continually introduced in most regions of the world, but not all survive and
coexist with the resident native species. Approaches analyzing the functional (or …

Recent work linking community structure and ecosystem function has primarily focused on
the effects of local species richness but has neglected the dispersal‐dependent processes …

This chapter covers plant invasions and invasibility of plant communities, with sections on
definitions and major patterns, habitat compatibility, propagule pressure and residence time …