Determinants of plant establishment success in a multispecies introduction experiment with native and alien species.

Determinants of plant establishment and invasion are a key issue in ecology and evolution. Although establishment success varies substantially among species, the importance of species traits and extrinsic factors as determinants of establishment in existing communities has remained difficult to prove in observational studies because they can be confounded and mask each other. Therefore, we conducted a large multispecies field experiment to disentangle the relative importance of extrinsic factors vs.

Modeling food webs: exploring unexplained structure using latent traits.

Several stochastic models have tried to capture the architecture of food webs. This approach is interesting, but it is limited by the fact that different assumptions can yield similar results. To overcome this limitation, we develop a purely statistical approach.