TY - JOUR T1 - Beyond species: why ecological interactions vary through space and time JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/001677 SP - 001677 AU - T. Poisot AU - D. B. Stouffer AU - D. Gravel Y1 - 2014/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/01/04/001677.abstract N2 - Community ecology is tasked with the considerable challenge of predicting the structure, and properties, of emerging ecosystems. It requires the ability to understand how and why species interact, as this will allow the development of mechanism-based predictive models, and as such to better characterize how ecological mechanisms act locally on the existence of inter-specific interactions. Here we argue that the current conceptualization of species interaction networks is illsuited for this task. Instead, we propose that future research must start to account for the intrinsic variability of interaction networks. This can be accomplished simply by recognizing that there exists intra-specific variability, in traits or properties related to the establishment of species interactions. By shifting the scale towards population-based processes, we show that this new approach will improve our predictive ability and mechanistic understanding of how species interact over biogeographical scales. ER -