Trait‐based approaches have improved our understanding of plant evolution, community
assembly and ecosystem functioning. A major challenge for the upcoming decades is to …

Ecological neutral theory has elicited strong opinions in recent years. Here, we review these
opinions and strip away some unfortunate problems with semantics to reveal three major …

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

A plethora of different theories, models, and concepts make up the field of community
ecology. Amid this vast body of work, is it possible to build one general theory of ecological …

The objective of science is to understand the natural world; we argue that prediction is the
only way to demonstrate scientific understanding, implying that prediction should be a …

This pioneering graduate textbook provides readers with the concepts and practical tools
required to understand the maximum entropy principle, and apply it to an understanding of …

Island faunas can be characterized by gigantism in small animals and dwarfism in large
animals, but the extent to which this so-called 'island rule'provides a general explanation for …

The maximum information entropy (MaxEnt) principle is a successful method of statistical
inference that has recently been applied to ecology. Here, we show how MaxEnt can …

Ecology Letters (2010) 13: 627–642 Abstract A unified theory in science is a theory that
shows a common underlying set of rules that regulate processes previously thought to be …

Identifying drivers of infectious disease patterns and impacts at the broadest scales of
organisation is one of the most crucial challenges for modern science, yet answers to many …