Phenotypic traits mediate organisms’ interactions with the environment and determine how they affect and are affected by their biotic and abiotic milieu. Thus, dispersion of trait values, or functional diversity (FD) of a community can offer insights into processes driving community assembly. For example, underdispersion of FD suggests that habitat ‘‘filtering’’ of species with unfavorable trai...

Understanding how the strengths of species interactions are distributed among species is critical for developing predictive models of natural food webs as well as for developing management and conservation strategies. Recently a number of ecologists have attempted to clarify the concepts of ‘‘strong-’’ and ‘‘weak-interactors’’ in a community, and to derive techniques for quantifying interaction...

The C/C ratio in pedogenic carbonate (i.e., CaCO3 formed in soil) is a significant tool for investigating C4 biomes of the past. However, the paleoecological meaning of dC values in pedogenic carbonate can change with the scale at which one considers the data. We describe studies of modern soils, fossil soils, and vegetation change in the Chihuahuan Desert of North America and elsewhere that re...

A wide variety of data sets produced by individual investigators are now synthesized to address ecological questions that span a range of spatial and temporal scales. It is important to facilitate such syntheses so that ‘‘consumers’’ of data sets can be confident that both input data sets and synthetic products are reliable. Necessary documentation to ensure the reliability and validation of da...

Various ecological mechanisms influence the forms of species richness relationships (SRRs). These mechanisms can be gathered under five general categories: more individuals, environmental heterogeneity, dispersal limitations, biotic interactions, and multiple species pools. Often only the first two categories are discussed. In contrast, we examine all five and explore how they can influence the...

Many unresolved issues in the ecology and evolution of marine populations center on how far planktonic larvae disperse away from their parents. Genetic tools provide a promising way to define the spatial spread of larvae, yet their accurate interpretation depends on the extent to which genetic loci are under selection. Genetic clines, geographic zones in which genetically differentiated populat...

Group brainstorming is a very popular technique for the creation of ideas, although the state of the art in psychological research backs from this kind of brainstorming. Electronic brainstorming overcomes some of the drawbacks and regains some value. Unfortunately, the electronic brainstorming still is in infantile state and lacks some modern techniques which may make the whole approach more ef...