mass effects

Contrasts between habitat generalists and specialists: an empirical extension to the basic metacommunity framework

Emergence of the metacommunity concept has made a substantial contribution to better understanding of the community composition and dynamics in a regional context. However, long-term field data for testing of available metacommunity models are still …

The power of species sorting: Local factors drive bacterial community composition over a wide range of spatial scales

There is a vivid debate on the relative importance of local and regional factors in shaping microbial communities, and on whether microbial organisms show a biogeographic signature in their distribution. Taking a metacommunity approach, spatial …

Integrating environmental and spatial processes in ecological community dynamics

The processes controlling the abundances of species across multiple sites form the cornerstone of modern ecology. In these metacommunities, the relative importance of local environmental and regional spatial processes is currently hotly debated, …