The Theory of Ecological Communities (Mpb-57)

Monographs in Population Biology #57

by Mark Vellend

A 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. The Theory of Ecological Communities takes this as a starting point to pull together community ecology's various perspectives into a more unified whole.Mark Vellend builds a theory of ecological communities based on four overarching 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.Reframing the numerous existing ideas in community ecology, The Theory of Ecological Communities provides a new way for thinking about biological composition and diversity.

Genres: Science, Ecology, Nonfiction

248 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 23, 2016

About the author

Mark Vellend is professor of biology at the Université de Sherbrooke and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of "The Theory of Ecological Communities" and "Everything Evolves: Why Evolution Explains More than We Think, from Proteins to Politics". He conducts research and writes about ecology, evolution, and biodiversity.

Reviews

[Jacob Elsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this is a very important book. It offers a great synthesis of pretty much all ecological research ever. Wouldn’t say it was an easy read. Very technical and at times I found myself zoning out and reading the words and not understanding what they meant haha!

Overall, recommend this book, especially to emerging researchers who want to either explore new research directions or further hone theirs. This book is also a great reference to anyone interested in ecology and research, I will be referring to it in the future and I would like to even read the whole thing again.

Giving it three stars because it was hard for me to read—I had a tight deadline. But when I have time to reread and focus on topics interesting to me, I think I will like it a lot more.

[Leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well structured and clear attempt to pull generalizations out of the wildly complex field of community ecology. How useful at what level? I would say an excellent teaching tool for high school and above with scaffolding, with potential to influence research/analysis methodology at the professional level --though there are some concerns with nomenclature/terminology, as well as function/utility in models/stats, Vellend's 4 high level processes in community ecology do seem to hold up under empirical examination.

[Anny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clear writing and synthesis. I recall reading the original Vellend 2010 as an eureka moment, and this was a great expansion on that. It's amazing seeing the myriad theories and verbal hypotheses organized so neatly, but it has yet to spark the type of inspiration for new work that I was hoping for.

[Randy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worked really well as our book for a graduate seminar class.

[Emilie Champagne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written and interesting. I understood most of it on my first read (yay!) and will come back to it again for sure. I think Mark's goal is reach: as a student, I found the proposed theory useful to make sense of the great array of hypothesis on horizontal communities.

[Eric Bauer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic. Sure to be the future standard for community ecology pedagogy.

[Steven Peck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most important book on community ecology I've read in a long time.