Macroecology : concepts and consequences : the 43rd Annual Symposium of the British Ecological Society, held at the University of Birmingham, 17-19 April 2002

Why are some taxa more diverse than others? Key innovations: the mechanisms of diversification Stochasticity and macroecology Why are most species rare? Why most species are rare: Perspectives from neutral theory Breaking the stick in time and space: species abundance, niche models, and metapopulations Why are there more species in the tropics? What would it take to eliminate the area hypothesis of latitudinal gradients? Climatic gradients of richness, dynamic hypotheses and historical contingency: reconciling the conflicting paradigms of diversity The importance of historical processes in global patterns of marine diversity Why are more species small-bodied? Body size and species-richness: a phylogenetic view Adaptive diversification of body size: the roles of physical constraint, energetics, and natural selection Why are some species more likely to go extinct? Life histories, population dynamics and extinction risk in fishes The routes to extinction Why aren't species more widely distributed? Physiological constraints on plant distributions Macroecology and microecology: linking large scale abundance to population processes Genetics and the boundaries of species distributions Why are there interspecific allometries? Why are there interspecific allometries? Intraspecific optimisation. Scaling the ecological, and evolutionary implications of vascular networks: Implications of common allometric constraints within and across plant taxa. Why is macroecology important? Macroecology and conservation biology: a world of birds Macroecology and Paleobiology Comparative analyses for adaptive radiations The next step in macroecology: from general empirical patterns to universal ecological laws.