Predators regulate communities through top‐down control in many ecosystems. Because most studies of top‐down control last less than a year and focus on only a subset of the community, they may miss predator effects that manifest at longer timescales or across whole food webs. In southeastern US salt marshes, short‐term and small‐scale experiments indicate that nektonic predators (e.g., blue crab, fish, terrapins) facilitate th...

Facilitation cascades arise where primary foundation species facilitate secondary (dependent) foundation species, and collectively, they increase habitat complexity and quality to enhance biodiversity. Whether such phenomena occur in nonmarine systems and if secondary foundation species enhance food web structure (e.g., support novel feeding guilds) and ecosystem function (e.g., provide nursery for juveniles) remain unclear. H...

Massive anthropogenic and climate‐related disturbances are now common in ecosystems worldwide, generating widespread die‐off and subsequent community recovery dominated by remnant‐patch dynamics rather than open‐gap dynamics. Whether communities can recover and, if so, which factors mediate recolonization rate and extent remain unresolved. Here we evaluate recolonization dynamics of southern U.S. salt marshes that experienced...