Aim Surveying the demography of populations near species range edges may indicate their vulnerability to range contractions or local extinction as the climate changes. In the rocky intertidal, not only are latitudinal ranges constricted by thermal stress, but tides also create zonation or a ‘vertical range’ driven by sharp environmental gradients. By investigating demographics along the latitudinal and vertical ranges simultan...

Intensifying climate change and an increasing need for understanding its impacts on ecological communities places new emphasis on testing environmental stress models ( ESMs ). Using a prior literature search plus references from a more recent search, I evaluated empirical support for ESMs , focusing on whether consumer pressure on prey decreased (consumer stress model; CSM ) or increased (prey stress model; PSM ) with increasi...

Spatiotemporal variability in primary producer growth rates is a fundamental aspect of community structure. Understanding drivers of these patterns and their response to climate variability and change are ongoing challenges. Nutrient and light limitations often are invoked as proximate drivers of these patterns, but many other environmental and biological factors vary across spatial and temporal scales. In temperate rocky inte...

A critical tool in assessing ecosystem change is the analysis of long‐term data sets, yet such information is generally sparse and often unavailable for many habitats. Kelp forests are an example of rapidly changing ecosystems that are in most cases data poor. Because kelp forests are highly dynamic and have high intrinsic interannual variability, understanding how regional‐scale drivers are driving kelp populations—and partic...

Understanding the relative roles of species interactions and environmental factors in structuring communities has historically focused on local scales where manipulative experiments are possible. However, recent interest in predicting the effects of climate change and species invasions has spurred increasing attention to processes occurring at larger spatial and temporal scales. The “meta‐ecosystem” approach is an ideal framew...

Decades of research have demonstrated that many calcifying species are negatively affected by ocean acidification, a major anthropogenic threat in marine ecosystems. However, even closely related species may exhibit different responses to ocean acidification and less is known about the drivers that shape such variation in different species. Here, we examine the drivers of physiological performance under ocean acidification in...

The difficulty of experimentally quantifying non‐trophic species interactions has long troubled ecologists. Increasingly, a new application of the classic “checkerboard distribution” approach is used to infer interactions by examining the pairwise frequency at which species are found to spatially co‐occur. However, the link between spatial associations, as estimated from observational co‐occurrence, and species interactions ha...

The earth is in the midst of a biodiversity crisis, and projections indicate continuing and accelerating rates of global changes. Future alterations in communities and ecosystems may be precipitated by changes in the abundance of strongly interacting species, whose disappearance can lead to profound changes in abundance of other species, including an increase in extinction rate for some. Nearshore coastal communities are often...

Robert T. Paine, who passed away on 13 June 2016, is among the most influential people in the history of ecology. Paine was an experimentalist, a theoretician, a practitioner, and proponent of the “ecology of place,” and a deep believer in the importance of natural history to ecological understanding. His scientific legacy grew from the discovery of a link between top‐down forcing and species diversity, a breakthrough that led...

Although theory suggests geographic variation in species' performance is determined by multiple niche parameters, little consideration has been given to the spatial structure of interacting stressors that may shape local and regional vulnerability to global change. Here, we use spatially explicit mosaics of carbonate chemistry, food availability and temperature spanning 1280 km of coastline to test whether persistent, overlapp...

Some marine ecosystems already experience natural declines in pH approximating those predicted with future anthropogenic ocean acidification ( OA ), the decline in seawater pH caused by the absorption of atmospheric CO 2 . The molecular mechanisms that allow organisms to inhabit these low pH environments, particularly those building calcium carbonate skeletons, are unknown. Also uncertain is whether an enhanced capacity to cop...

Ecology Letters (2012) 15 : 291–300 Abstract Organisms eating each other are only one of many types of well documented and important interactions among species. Other such types include habitat modification, predator interference and facilitation. However, ecological network research has been typically limited to either pure food webs or to networks of only a few (