Understanding the mechanisms controlling community diversity, functions, succession, and
biogeography is a central, but poorly understood, topic in ecology, particularly in microbial …

Microbial communities are at the heart of all ecosystems, and yet microbial community
behavior in disturbed environments remains difficult to measure and predict. Understanding …

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

Microbial communities typically contain many rare taxa that make up the majority of the
observed membership, yet the contribution of this microbial “rare biosphere” to community …

Understanding the causes of spatial variation in species richness is a major research focus
of biogeography and macroecology. Gridded environmental data and species richness …

The growing need for baseline data against which efforts to reduce the rate of biodiversity
loss can be judged highlights the importance of long-term datasets, some of which are as …

Species interactions drive evolution while evolution shapes these interactions. The resulting
eco-evolutionary dynamics and their repeatability depend on how adaptive mutations …

Background It is now apparent that the complex microbial communities found on and in the
human body vary across individuals. What has largely been missing from previous studies is …

Ecologists have long studied the temporal dynamics of plant and animal communities with
much less attention paid to the temporal dynamics exhibited by microbial communities. As a …

Evolutionary ecologists are increasingly combining phylogenetic data with distributional and
ecological data to assess how and why communities of species differ from random …