Scientific advances in environmental data coverage and machine learning algorithms have improved the ability to make large‐scale predictions where data are missing. These advances allowed us to develop a spatially resolved proxy for predicting numbers of tropical nearshore marine taxa. A diverse marine environmental spatial database was used to model numbers of taxa from ∼1000 field sites, and the predictions were applied to a...

The impact of species loss from competitive communities partly depends on how populations of the surviving species respond. Predicting the response should be straightforward using models that describe population growth as a function of competitor densities; but these models require accurate estimates of interaction strengths. Here, we quantified how well we could predict responses to competitor removal in a community of annual...