Niche vs neutral, or niche-neutral feedback: beyond the continuum

What is it about?

Being able to identify and predict which factors form and maintain communities of species is important under environmental change. We introduce a new tool called CAPS (Community Assembly Phase Space) to address this problem. Using CAPS we show how a community is affected by feedbacks between two key processes, dispersal and the species niche. This can produce communities that look different to ones formed by what was previously thought to be a simple trade-off between the relative effects of these two processes. CAPS improves our understanding of natural communities, and provides a flexible and accurate tool to study them.

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