Understanding the role of individual-scale processes in community-level dynamics: What are the dynamically relevant organizational scales for predicting community dynamics?

• Oswald J. Schmitz

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Abstract
Community ecologists continually strive to build models that realistically describe the dynamics of the systems they study. An important challenge is discovering which biological details are needed for accurate predictions. There is increasing evidence that processes operating at the level of individuals in communities can have an important bearing on the overall dynamics of the community as a whole. A Working Group will be convened to synthesize existing empirical information on the role of individual behavior and life-histories in shaping community dynamics, identify limitations of existing theory in dealing with issues of scaling from individuals to communities and begin developing new mathematical tools that explicitly deal with scaling from individual-level processes to community dynamics.