Why do species live where they live? What determines the abundance and diversity of species in a given area? What role do species play in the functioning of entire ecosystems? All of these questions share a single core concept-the ecological niche. Although the niche concept has fallen into disfavor among ecologists in recent years, Jonathan M. Chase and Mathew A. Leibold argue that the niche is an ideal tool with which to unify disparate research and theoretical approaches in contemporary ecology.
Chase and Leibold define the niche as including both what an organism needs from its...

Charles Elton was one of the founders of ecology, and his Animal Ecology was one of the seminal works that defined the field. In this book Elton introduced and drew together many principles still central to ecology today, including succession, niche, food webs, and the links between communities and ecosystems, each of which he illustrated with well-chosen examples. Many of Elton's ideas have proven remarkably prescient-for instance, his emphasis on the role climatic changes play in population fluctuations anticipated recent research in this area stimulated by concerns about global...

Until recently community ecology--a science devoted to understanding the patterns and processes of species distribution and abundance--focused mainly on specific and often limited scales of a single community. Since the 1970s, for example, metapopulation dynamics--studies of interacting groups of populations connected through movement--concentrated on the processes of population turnover, extinction, and establishment of new populations.
Metacommunities takes the hallmarks of metapopulation theory to the next level by considering a group of communities, each of which may contain...