Disentangling the roles of environment and space in ecology

Most core problems in ecology revolve around variations of the abundance, diversity or metabolic activity of organisms through time and space. Our fundamental questions are: ‘Why are there more organisms (or more kinds of organisms, or different kinds of organisms, etc.) here than there?’ Although I will focus on abundance in this commentary, the same question can be asked about spatial patterns of diversity, productivity, community structure, body size, etc.