Frontiers in community ecology

This talk will highlight the most important conceptual advances in community ecology of the last 15-20 years and key questions that must be answered. Major ideas include a very substantial role for dispersal in community dynamics, the complementary roles of stabilizing and equalizing mechanisms in coexistence, the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, using functional traits (including phylogeny and biogeographic proxies) in quantitative predictions of community dynamics and structure.