Dear Pr. Bronte,
On behalf of my co-authors, Dominique Gravel and Daniel B. Stouffer, I would like to submit the attached manuscript for publication consideration as a "Forum" in Oïkos.
There is widespread acceptance that an ecological community consists of species and their interactions. Despite this fact, most research on the variation of ecological communities focuses exclusively on variation of the local species pool, implying that much of mainstream community ecology is in fact disconnected from its most basic definition. At best, species interactions are treated as a covariate; at worst, they are neglected entirely. In our manuscript, we argue that this stems from a lack of awareness and recognition of the mechanisms that drive variation of species interactions through space and time.
In this contribution, we classify these mechanisms in three large families: effects of local abundances, effects of local species' trait distributions, and finally indirect effects of interactions. We propose that studies of the variation of community structure should draw explicitly on these mechanisms. Moreover, we show that (i) it is possible to integrate multiples sources of variation in ecological interactions into a cohesive, spatially-explicit statistical framework, and (ii) the approach we propose is not disconnected from current paradigms in community ecology but instead represents an attempt to integrate important yet neglected mechanisms.
As outlined by Oïkos, the description of the "Forum" section mentions that articles should strive to "transgress existing boundaries by synthesizing larger fields or seemingly disparate areas, and to offer new ways of interpreting existing data". We are confident that our contribution fits this bill perfectly since we propose to DBS: I think the following is a bit too wordy and somewhat nebulous direct research towards novel statistical approaches that draw from a synthesis of different families of mechanisms.
We hope that this submission will be viewed favorably by the editorial board,
On behalf of the authors,
T. Poisot