The proposed collaborative working group will bring together a body of researchers to integrate three areas of ecology that have advanced rapidly over the past decade: metabolic theory, neutral biodiversity theory, and spatial macroecology. The goal of this working group will be to delineate the separate and overlapping realms of each area and to assess the prospects of synthesizing them into a unified theory that integrates ecological and evolutionary patterns and processes at multiple scales and throughout the biological hierarchy. Such a unified theory of ecology would lay the foundation for understanding and predicting the response of real-world systems to global change.
