Abstract. We use hypercovers to study the homotopy theory of simplicial presheaves. The main result says that model structures for simplicial presheaves involving local weak equivalences can be constructed by localizing at the hypercovers. One consequence is that the fibrant objects can be explicitly described in terms of a hypercover descent condition, and the fibrations can be described by a relative descent condition. We give a few applications for this new description of the homotopy theory of simplicial presheaves.

We give a homotopy theoretic characterization of stacks on a site C as the homotopy sheaves of groupoids on C. We use this characterization to construct a model category in which stacks are the fibrant objects. We compare different definitions of stacks and show that they lead to Quillen equivalent model categories. In addition, we show that these model structures are Quillen equivalent to the S 2 -nullification of Jardine's model structure on sheaves of simplicial sets on C.

We give a homotopy theoretic characterization of sheaves on a stack and, more generally, a presheaf of groupoids on an arbitary small site ᑝ. We use this to prove homotopy invariance and generalized descent statements for categories of sheaves and quasi-coherent sheaves. As a corollary we obtain an alternate proof of a generalized change of rings theorem of Hovey.

Abstract. We extend the notion of algebraic stack to an arbitrary subcanonical site C. If the topology on C is local on the target and satisfies descent for morphisms, we show that algebraic stacks are precisely those which are weakly equivalent to representable presheaves of groupoids whose domain map is a cover. This leads naturally to a definition of algebraic n-stacks. We also compare different sites naturally associated to a stack.

The purpose of this paper is to give a new presentation of some of the main results concerning Landweber exactness in the context of the homotopy theory of stacks. We present two new criteria for Landweber exactness over a flat Hopf algebroid. The first criterion is used to classify stacks arising from Landweber exact maps of rings. Using as extra input only Lazard's theorem and Cartier's classification of p-typical formal group laws, this result is then applied to deduce many of the main results concerning Landweber exactness in stable homotopy theory and to compute the Bousfield classes of certain BP-algebra spectra. The second criterion can be regarded as a generalization of the Landweber exact functor theorem, and we use it to give a proof of the original theorem.