Assembly Models - Ecology - Oxford Bibliographies

Understanding the processes that drive the assembly of a community has been a central theme of ecology since the foundation of the discipline. It concerns basic questions such as how do we start from a regional species pool to assemble a structured community? How many species should be found at a given location? What is the relationship between community structure and the environment? Studying the different drivers of community assembly is not only interesting for its own sake, but is also essential for a predictive ecology. The different processes involved in the assembly of a community will also be the ones driving the response to future environmental changes. The theme of community assembly is a huge area including an immense amount of theoretical, experimental, and observational studies. This article and bibliography will attempt to cover the main aspects of the discipline with a special attention to assembly models. It starts with a section defining the domain of the article and then sets the stage with the presentation of historical backgrounds. The next section addresses the community assembly dynamics in space and time. Conceptual aspects of the empirical investigation of community assembly are then presented with a section on the war over assembly rules, which launched the tradition of null model testing in community ecology. The article ends with the subject of the future of community assembly and an outlook on three fields that have gained considerable interest over the last decade: ecophylogenetics, trait-based assembly, and network ecology. The focus is mainly on the ecology of community assembly and therefore the reader interested by its evolutionary counterpart should consult the theme of adaptive radiation.