In 1986, Thomas W. Schoener wrote a thought-provoking book chapter describing ecological communities along five organismal and five environmental axes. It was thought-provoking in the sense that Schoener attempted to unify community ecology using a minimal set of variables at a time when ecologists were doubtful of any unifying principle in community ecology. After three decades of Schoener's chapter, community ... Read moreecologists are still divided about whether there could be a general theory of community... Mark Vellend elegantly attempts to bridge this divide by introducing the theory of high-level processes in ecological communities in his Princeton Population Monograph entitled The Theory of Ecological Communities.
Madhav P. Thakur, Trends in Ecology and Evolution Vellend (biology, Univ. de Sherbrooke, Canada) provides a useful historical account of the wide variety of methods used in the field to lay the foundation for his proposed resolution of the resulting 'mess.' The book is well written, profusely referenced, and a worthy addition to the distinguished 'Monographs in Population Biology' series from Princeton University Press.
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