I have been in Lopé National Park, Gabon, for the last few weeks, helping Dr. Sam Moore as he leads up Oxford’s field campaign to sample the functional diversity of these forests in collaboration with Gabon’s national parks agency and the Wildlife Conservation Society. The forests are unique in still having large elephant populations, a…

We just had a new paper on community assembly concepts come out in Ecology Letters. The focus of the work is on predictability. Making community ecology useful for applications like conservation, land management, or agriculture requires the ability to predict the future rather than simply explain the past. Strong predictions are a key property of…