There is a growing consensus that relatively few factors with broad applicability underlie
changes in the structure of different plant communities along different environmental …

Two general models of plant community structure, the community-unit and the continuum,
have dominated the thinking of American community ecologists. Hypotheses derived from …

Alpine plant communities vary, and their environmental covariates could influence their
response to climate change. A single multilevel model of how alpine plant community …

Niche-based and neutral models of community structure posit distinct mechanisms
underlying patterns in community structure; correlation between species' distributions and …

Ecological communities can vary greatly in species composition. Often this variation is
discontinuous, in that abrupt changes in composition occur over small distances in space or …

Community assembly processes are thought to shape the mean, spread, and spacing of
functional trait values within communities. Two broad categories of assembly processes …

The study of diversity gradients due to elevation dates back to the foundation of
biogeography and ecology. Although elevation-driven patterns of plant diversity have been …

A goal of landscape ecology is to infer processes or constraints that generate spatial pattern
in communities and ecosystems. The rich tradition of plant community ecology is now being …

Summary 1 We quantify the effects of spatial structure on individual, population and
community biomass within a natural community of annuals for two years (1994 and 1996) in …

Questions We investigated some commonly held assumptions of community assembly
theory needed to provide accurate predictions of changes in plant species assemblages …