As most ecosystems are being challenged by multiple, co-occurring stressors, an important challenge is to understand and predict how stressors interact to affect biological responses. A popular approach is to design factorial experiments that measure biological responses to pairs of stressors and compare the observed response to a null model expectation. Unfortunately, we believe experiment sample sizes are inadequate to detect most non-null stressor interaction responses, greatly hindering progress.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnderstanding how multiple co-occurring environmental stressors combine to affect biodiversity and ecosystem services is an on-going grand challenge for ecology. Currently, progress has been made through accumulating large numbers of smaller-scale empirical studies that are then investigated by meta-analyses to detect general patterns. There is particular interest in detecting, understanding and predicting 'ecological surprises' where stressors interact in a non-additive (e.
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