The Theory of Ecological Communities (MPB-57) (Monographs in Population Biology Book 121)

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 communities? What other scientific areas might serve as a guiding framework? As it turns out, the core focus of community ecology—understanding patterns of diversity and composition of biological variants across space and time—is shared by evolutionary biology and its very coherent conceptual framework, population genetics theory. __The Theory of Ecological Communities__ takes this as a starting point to pull together community ecology's various perspectives into a more unified whole. Mark Vellend builds a theory of ecological communities based on four overarching processes: selection among species, drift, dispersal, and speciation. These are analogues of the four central processes in population genetics theory—selection within species, drift, gene flow, and mutation—and together they subsume almost all of the many dozens of more specific models built to describe the dynamics of communities of interacting species. The result is a theory that allows the effects of many low-level processes, such as competition, facilitation, predation, disturbance, stress, succession, colonization, and local extinction to be understood as the underpinnings of high-level processes with widely applicable consequences for ecological communities. Reframing the numerous existing ideas in community ecology, __The Theory of Ecological Communities__ provides a new way for thinking about biological composition and diversity. Contents Acknowledgments 1. Introduction PART I. APPROACHES, IDEAS, AND THEORIES IN COMMUNITY ECOLOGY 2. How Ecologists Study Communities 3. A Brief History of Ideas in Community Ecology PART II. THE THEORY OF ECOLOGICAL COMMUNITIES 4. The Pursuit of Generality in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology 5. High- Level Processes in Ecological Communities 6. Simulating Dynamics in Ecological Communities PART III. EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE 7. The Nature of Empirical Evidence 8. Empirical Evidence: Selection 9. Empirical Evidence: Ecological Drift and Dispersal 10. Empirical Evidence: Speciation and Species Pools PART IV. CONCLUSIONS, REFLECTIONS, AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS 11. From Process to Pattern and Back Again 12. The Future of Community Ecology References Index