The basis for this research area is that patterns in fluctuations in population size of single species will

characterize the form of the distribution of abundances of the species constituting the whole community. A change in the environment will therefore affect the species abundance distribution. In this research area we therefore focus on processes affecting the shape of species abundance distribution.

An important topic is also how stochastic fluctuations in the environment will affect the vertical and horizontal trophic interactions among species. These research questions require that the single-species approaches in the other two research areas (population ecology, evolutionary biology) are extended to include multi-species interactions. An important focus is therefore to implement demographic and evolutionary models in the analyses of interspecific interactions.