Predicting the dynamics of biotic communities is difficult because species’ environmental responses are not independent, but covary due to shared or contrasting ecological strategies and the influence of species interactions. We used latent‐variable joint species distribution models to analyze paired historical and contemporary inventories of 585 vascular plant species on 471 islands in the southwest Finnish archipelago. Large...

Understanding the role of interspecific interactions in shaping ecological communities is one of the central goals in community ecology. In fungal communities, measuring interspecific interactions directly is challenging because these communities are composed of large numbers of species, many of which are unculturable. An indirect way of assessing the role of interspecific interactions in determining community structure is to...

The ongoing global change and the increased interest in macroecological processes call for the analysis of spatially extensive data on species communities to understand and forecast distributional changes of biodiversity. Recently developed joint species distribution models can deal with numerous species efficiently, while explicitly accounting for spatial structure in the data. However, their applicability is generally limite...

Summary Understanding of the ecological factors that shape intraspecific variation of insect microbiota in natural populations is relatively poor. In Lepidopteran caterpillars, microbiota is assumed to be mainly composed of transient bacterial symbionts acquired from the host plant. We sampled Glanville fritillary ( Melitaea cinxia ) caterpillars from natural populations to describe their gut microbiome and to identify potenti...

Joint species distribution modeling has enabled researchers to move from species‐level to community‐level analyses, leading to statistically more efficient and ecologically more informative use of data. Here, we propose joint species movement modeling (JSMM) as an analogous approach that enables inferring both species‐ and community‐level movement parameters from multispecies movement data. The species‐level movement parameter...

Community ecology aims to understand what factors determine the assembly and dynamics of species assemblages at different spatiotemporal scales. To facilitate the integration between conceptual and statistical approaches in community ecology, we propose Hierarchical Modelling of Species Communities ( HMSC ) as a general, flexible framework for modern analysis of community data. While non‐manipulative data allow for only correl...