Lars Götzenberger is the first author of a new paper entitled "Ecological assembly rules in plant communities—approaches, patterns and prospects" which was a collaborative effort with other members from the working group and an international group of colleagues.

In this article the theoretical background for assembly rules in plant communities is explored. A large data set stemming from 59 papers that use null models to assess assembly rules was analysed and the authors show that results from these studies are more often not indicative of the idea that species coexistence is limited by their individual niches. From the data at hand, however, it can not be distinguished if this finding is caused by methodological shortcomings or if plant communities are actually rather determined by stochastic processes. Guidelines for best practice are defined in an attempt to direct future assembly rules research.

The article is now in press in Biological Reviews and can be viewed here or requested from the first author.

Several members of Plant Ecology Lab are participating at the 54th Symposium of IAVS, being held in Lyon. Lars Götzenberger, Tsipe Aavik and Jaak- Albert Metsoja will present their work with a talk and Kadri Koorem will have a poster.