The mechanics of community assembly and succession

Understanding the development of community pattern, manifest as species coexistence and relative abundance at local and regional scales, remains a focus of ecological research. Two strategies have been employed to understand distribution and abundance. The first approach is comparative and is based on correlation. In this case, organization is deduced from an analysis of extant community organization. The second approach seeks to understand organization by considering the production of the extant community state. This is as a question of the dynamics or development of an organizing system. The expression of ecological mechanisms is constrained by the sequence of community states which regulate the production of community pattern. The dynamics of this process are the mechanics of community assembly. Here, the mechanics of community assembly and production of ecological pattern are explored.