Community Ecology: Is It Time to Move On?

TLDR

Community ecology is characterized by contingency and complexity, yielding few general laws and highly local models, yet it remains a robust science driving mechanistic insights into ecological causes, patterns, and processes. Traditional, local, experimental community ecology remains essential for addressing environmental challenges, especially under global change, and should not be abandoned.

Abstract

Because of the contingency and complexity of its subject matter, community ecology has few general laws. Laws and models in community ecology are highly contingent, and their domain is usually very local. This fact does not mean that community ecology is a weak science; in fact, it is the locus of exciting advances, with growing mechanistic understanding of causes, patterns, and processes. Further, traditional community ecological research, often local, experimental, and reductionist, is crucial in understanding and responding to many environmental problems, including those posed by global changes. For both scientific and societal reasons, it is not time to abandon community ecology.