{"product_id":"the-theory-of-ecological-communities-9780691208992","title":"The Theory of Ecological Communities","description":"\u003cp\u003eA 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. \u003ci\u003eThe Theory of Ecological Communities\u003c\/i\u003e takes this as a starting point to pull together community ecology's various perspectives into a more unified whole.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMark 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eReframing the numerous existing ideas in community ecology, \u003ci\u003eThe Theory of Ecological Communities\u003c\/i\u003e provides a new way for thinking about biological composition and diversity.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Mark Vellend","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42956031230070,"sku":"9780691208992","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0671\/1374\/6550\/files\/CoreSourceHub_769347f4-9964-4f83-a163-d74d17a44b50.jpg?v=1767727214","url":"https:\/\/ingramacademic.com\/products\/the-theory-of-ecological-communities-9780691208992","provider":"Ingram Academic \u0026 Professional","version":"1.0","type":"link"}