Significance An ecological community is a dynamic complex system with a myriad of interacting species, which are controlled by various scale-dependent deterministic and stochastic forces. With rapid advances in genomics technologies, categorizing biological diversity, particularly microbial diversity, becomes relatively easy, but the great challenge is to disentangle the mechanisms controlling biological diversity. The general null model-based framework developed in this study provides an effective and robust tool to ecologists for quantitatively assessing ecological stochasticity. By highlighting the caveats such as model selection, similarity metrics, and spatial scales, this study provides guidance for appropriate use of null model-based approaches for examining community assembly processes. Although this framework was tested with microbial data, it should also be applicable to plant and animal ecology.
Recent progress in protistology has shown that these organisms (protists) are far more diverse than traditionally assumed by soil ecologists. Most studies have grouped these int...
From headwaters to mouth, the physical variables within a river system present a continuous gradient of physical conditions. This gradient should elicit a series of responses wi...
Diversity is the hard currency of ecologists. Various statistics have been developed for summarizing the diversity of an ecological community. A commonly adopted summary statist...
A clustering method is presented to describe the discontinuities in a multivariate (multispecies) series of biological samples, obtained from a single station at successive time...
It is virtually impossible to predict the next 25 years of research in aquatic ecology and behaviour with any accuracy. However, by identifying those areas that are the current ...
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