Ecology in spatially and temporally structured environments

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Living organisms and their habitats vary across space and time. Unraveling the mechanisms involved in complex spatial and temporal patterns in nature is one of the most important intellectual challenges in the science of ecology. Remarkable progress has been made in our understanding of how communities are structured, yet major gaps and related challenges remain. Spatial and temporal environmental heterogeneity (resource or non-resource) is widely recognized as a mechanism underlying the structure of ecological communities. To date, work on spatial and temporal heterogeneity has almost exclusively focused on the variance (how much) component. However, similar levels of environmental variation are often structured differently in space (where variation occurs) and time (when variation occurs), likely affecting species distributions and the ways they coexist. There has been limited work on the importance of the spatial and temporal structural components (i.e., covariance or autocorrelation) of environments on the dynamics and patterns of distribution and coexistence of multiple species.