Concepts

The hypothesis that predispersal seed predators preferentially attack high-quality flowers, potentially masking negative effects of environmental stressors

Predicts that species interactions should disappear at the stressful end of environmental gradients where abiotic conditions constrain species ranges

The hypothesis that animals allocate less time to antipredator vigilance as a function of increasing numbers of animals foraging together

Hypothesis that parasitism of dominant plant species reduces their competitive ability, allowing less competitive species to increase in abundance

Species with greater primary production exert the main controls for the functioning of ecosystems due to greater aboveground abundance of biomass or leaf area that promotes resource uptake

The concept that higher trophic levels are more sensitive to environmental change due to their smaller population sizes and greater environmental demands

The hypothesis that secondary metabolites in certain pollen types provide protection against natural enemies

The location of extrafloral nectaries relative to plant reproductive structures acts to distract flower-damaging ants or other visitors from flowers, and consequently pollinators as well

The hypothesis that species that are competitively dominant have reduced ability to discover new resources quickly

Predicts that dominant species may be more specialized on particular resources than subordinates, allowing subordinate species to coexist by better capitalizing on unused resources.

Predicts that species can persist beyond some threshold of abiotic stress due to reduced competition, making range margins determined by species interactions rather than abiotic constraints

The requirement that the sum of species-area relationships for subgroups should equal the species-area relationship for the entire assemblage

The postulated cascade of biodiversity loss that would occur in aspen and willow ecosystems if red-naped sapsuckers were removed

The rule predicts that species diversity should decrease linearly as the number or abundance of dominant species increases.

The hypothesis that caddisflies gain nutritional benefits both from consuming conditioned detritus and from consuming algae that grows from nutrients released during detritus processing

hypothesis that animals will avoid feeding in areas with high dust deposition

Exotic species benefit from the loss of a subset of their natural enemies during immigration

Predicts functional and phylogenetic overdispersion in communities where closely related species will compete more strongly than distantly related species, leading to traits being more widely disperse...

The concept that quality of social relationships may be more important than number of relationships for stress reduction

Hypothesis that human activity displaces predators creating areas with reduced predation risk for prey species

The hypothesis that habitats with larger surface area provide more niches for arthropods, resulting in greater species richness

The principle that macroecological patterns should be independent of the taxonomic choices used to define assemblages