Frontiers of Ecology

In December 1999 the National Science Foundation convened a white paper committee to evaluate what we know and do not know about important ecological processes, what hurdles currently hamper our progress, and what intellectual and conceptual interfaces need to be encouraged. The committee distilled the discussion into four frontiers in research on the ecological structure of the earth's biological diversity and the ways in which ecological processes continuously shape that structure (i.e., ecological dynamics). This article summarizes the discussions of those frontiers and explains why they are crucial to our understanding of how ecological processes shape patterns and dynamics of global biocomplexity. The frontiers are 1. Dynamics of coalescence in complex communities. 2. Evolutionary and historical determinants of ecological processes: The role of ecological memory. 3. Emergent properties of complex systems: Biophysical constraints and evolutionary attractors. 4. Ecological topology: Defining the spatiotemporal domains of causality for ecological structure and processes.