ABSTRACT
One could say that ecology is a science driven by an interest in processes that are inherently spatial by nature. We strive to explain why organisms appear in one location and not in another. We characterize change in community composition along environmental gradients and explore the interplay between extinction and colonization in maintaining spatially distributed metapopulations. Indeed, one of the classic textbooks in ecology originally published in the 1970s by Charles Krebs (Krebs 1978) is Ecology: The Experimental Analysis of Distribution and Abundance. The title nicely illustrates the point that many questions in ecology arise from the observation that organisms and the ecological processes that inuence them vary in space.
