<p>Instructions: The main parts of this paper that I want you to focus on are Section 1 (INTRODUCTION), Section 2 (CONTEMPORARY COEXISTENCE THEORY AND COMMUNITY ASSEMBLY), and the subsection of Section 3 titled “Trait-Phylogeny-Environment Relationships” (Sections 3.2, 3.2.1, 3.2.2, 3.2.3, feel free to skip section 3.1).</p>

<ol>
  <li>What is community assembly and what does it have to do with biodiversity?</li>
  <li>Let’s spend a little time thinking about Figure 1. This is an important figure that explains a lot about how we currently think about communities. Think about the different arrows and labels on this figure. What do they mean and how are they determining what is in a local community?</li>
  <li>What is coexistence theory? What is its goal or focus?</li>
  <li>Figure 3 is another important figure. It pulls together all the concepts of coexistence theory.
    <ul>
      <li>what is the big difference between the 3 species in panel b)</li>
      <li>what does this mean about their niches and overlap in resource use?</li>
      <li>what is panel a) showing us?</li>
      <li>if you have not been exposed to R* theory before, panel d) is probably a mystery to you, so ignore it for the time being and I will talk about this in class.</li>
      <li>let’s focus on panel e). Why does every species have a population growth rate that declines as its frequency (relative abundance) in the community increases?</li>
      <li>Why does panel e) tell us about which species are able to coexist together?</li>
    </ul>
  </li>
  <li>Stabilizing niche differences and relative fitness differences are the two main processes that determine whether two species can coexist.
    <ul>
      <li>what types of things can create stabilizing niche differences?</li>
      <li>why does a large difference in fitness make coexistence harder?</li>
    </ul>
  </li>
  <li>Let’s put this together conceptually. I have two species with large differences in their relative fitness. To be able to coexist with each other, would they likely need large or small stabilizing niche differences? Why?</li>
  <li>In the scenario discussed in figure 3, what role do phylogeny and traits play in which species can coexist?</li>
  <li>What can phylogenetic or trait clustering in communities tell us?</li>
  <li>What are some of the difficulties of interpreting these patterns?</li>
</ol>