Community assembly and species coexistence in the heterogeneous world

How ecological communities are assembled and maintained is a fundamental question in community ecology. To tackle this challenge in the heterogeneous world, we need to understand how community assembly patterns change with environmental gradients and how species coexist in temporally fluctuating environments. In the first of my talk, I introduce our study on how plant community assembly patterns change along with the largest global environmental gradient, the latitudinal gradient. Then, I will present how the seasonal variability of environments contributes to the coexistence of phytoplankton species in a lake. These results altogether uncover how spatiotemporal heterogeneity of environments forms ecological communities in nature.