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Understanding how communities of living organisms assemble has been a central question in ecology since the early days of the discipline. Disentangling the different processes involved in community assembly is not only interesting in itself but also crucial for an understanding of how communities will behave under future environmental scenarios. The traditional concept of assembly rules reflects the notion that species do not co‐occur randomly but are restricted in their co‐occurrence by interspecific competition. This concept can be redefined in a more general framework where the co‐occurrence of species is a product of chance, historical patterns of speciation and migration, dispersal, abiotic environmental factors, and biotic interactions, with none of these processes being mutually exclusive.

Here we present a survey and meta‐analyses of 59 papers that compare observed patterns in plant communities with …