Most bioassessment programs rest on the assumption that species have different niches,
and that abiotic environmental conditions and changes therein determine community …

Recently, conditionally rare taxa (CRTs)–those taxa that are typically in very low abundance
but occasionally achieve prevalence–were shown to contribute to patterns of microbial …

Temporal environmental fluctuations, such as seasonality, exert strong controls on
biodiversity. While the effects of seasonality are well known, the predictability of fluctuations …

Introduction Invertebrate communities are central to many environmental monitoring
programs. In freshwater ecosystems, aquatic macroinvertebrates are collected, identified …

Marine conservation increasingly focuses on describing and maintaining ecosystem
functioning. However, it is difficult to find suitable measures for whole-ecosystem functioning …

Ecologists have long investigated why communities are composed of a few common species
and many rare species. Most studies relate rarity to either niche differentiation among …

Anthropogenic modifications of sediment load can cause ecological degradation in stream
and river ecosystems. However, in practice, identifying when and where sediment is the …

Long‐term studies in ecology are essential for understanding natural variability and in
interpreting responses to disturbances and human perturbations. We assessed the long …

We present a cross-system comparison of benthic species pools, species diversity,
functional complexity and rarity in 2 typical Arctic coastal systems: an open shelf marginal …

The goal of the present study was to evaluate whether the Eastern Canadian Diatom Index
(IDEC: Indice Diatomées de l'Est du Canada), which was built on fine-scale taxonomic …