Disentangling the roles of environment and space in ecology

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Most core problems in ecology revolve around variations of the abundance, diversity or metabolic activity of organisms through time and space. Our fundamental questions are: ‘Why are there more organisms (or more kinds of organisms, or different kinds of organisms, etc.) here than there?’ Although I will focus on abundance in this commentary, the same question can be asked about spatial patterns of diversity, productivity, community structure, body size, etc.