A Marriage of Models and Maps: Community Theory and Species Distribution Models

Community ecology has seen tremendous advances in recent decades. However, community models are rarely fitted to time series and spatially referenced field data. I therefore summarize recent efforts to unify community theory with spatio-temporal statistics. Using case studies involving the Bering Sea and Gulf of St. Lawrence, I show that multivariate spatio-temporal models can capture dominant patterns in community dynamics while estimating species interactions and community stability.