Towards a mechanistic understanding of distribution-abundance relationships

In a recent paper in QRB, Borregaard and Rahbek reviews the causality of one of ecology's most pervasive patterns, the distribution-abundance relationship. Cutting through the unclarity of current debate, the authors integrate the proposed mechanisms into one coherent framework.
The key to this coherent framework is that there are distinct modes causality: Structural and dynamic mechanisms have disparate ways of creating the relationship, and assume different pathways of causality. Borregaard and Rahbek review the mechanisms in this light, and show how they complement each other to generate all the types of distribution-abundance relationship that have been described. Read the paper.