Community ecology is frequently invoked as complementary to and useful for guiding ecological restoration. While the conceptual literature is devoted to this unification, first‐hand accounts from practitioners and ecologists suggest that integration may be weak in practice. To date, there have been no analyses of how extensively community ecology theory appears in the empirical restoration literature. We address this knowledge gap with the first quantitative assessment of the extent to which community ecology concepts appear in empirical restoration literature by analysing the use of community ecology theories, concepts and conceptually derived tools in the design and interpretation of 1,000+ experimental ecological restoration studies over time (20 years) across all global regions. We also gauge general trends in author demographics, focal ecosystems and taxa targeted by these studies. We found that the incorporation of community ecology into restoration research has increased significantly in recent years. Community assembly and succession theories were the community ecology concepts integrated most often, while the functional traits framework and evolutionary theory have increased in usage recently. Synthesis and applications. Restoration endeavours are increasingly infused with elements of community ecology. Our results highlight the widespread application of deterministic models of community structure in restoration design and the rise of ecosystem service and function‐focused restoration. With this diagnostic summary of these applications, ecologists and restoration practitioners can move forward while directly exploring underdeveloped synergies between theory and practice.

Summary Large intraspecific functional trait variation strongly impacts many aspects of communities and ecosystems, and is the medium upon which evolution works. Yet intraspecific trait variation is inconsistent and hard to predict across traits, species and locations. We measured within‐species variation in leaf mass per area (LMA), leaf dry matter content (LDMC), branch wood density (WD), and allocation to stem area vs leaf area in branches (branch Huber value (HV)) across the aridity range of seven Australian eucalypts and a co‐occurring Acacia species to explore how traits and their variances change with aridity. Within species, we found consistent increases in LMA, LDMC and WD and HV with increasing aridity, resulting in consistent trait coordination across leaves and branches. However, this coordination only emerged across sites with large climate differences. Unlike trait means, patterns of trait variance with aridity were mixed across populations and species. Only LDMC showed constrained trait variation in more xeric species and drier populations that could indicate limits to plasticity or heritable trait variation. Our results highlight that climate can drive consistent within‐species trait patterns, but that patterns might often be obscured by the complex nature of morphological traits, sampling incomplete species ranges or sampling confounded stress gradients.

Climate change is predicted to have profound consequences for multispecies coexistence, and thus, patterns of biological diversity. These consequences will be mediated by direct and indirect impacts of environmental change on species’ vital rates and interactions. While the impacts of environmental change on individual species has received much attention to date, the consequences for coexistence mediated by changes in the strength and direction of multispecies interactions are not as well understood. To investigate how coexistence dynamics may be sensitive to environmental change, we conducted a field experiment in a diverse semi‐arid annual plant system. We imposed a water manipulation treatment in two sites that vary in aridity and associated rainfall. Focusing on four common annual plant species in these sites, we quantified the fecundity (seed production) of individuals in response to a gradient of intra‐ and interspecific competitor densities and aridity. We then used these fecundities to parameterize an annual plant population model and examine the influence of aridity and species identity on resultant coexistence dynamics (as a function of stabilizing niche differences and fitness inequalities). While the responses of some vital rates and competitive impacts to watering varied somewhat predictably across sites, coexistence metrics encapsulating changes in these vital rates and interaction strengths did not. Fitness inequalities among our focal species were driven largely by differences in sensitivity to competition, which were almost always much greater than the magnitude of stabilizing niche differences. These findings were surprising given observational evidence suggesting that these species do coexist at local scales in these natural communities. Synthesis. Our study is one of the first to explicitly consider the influence of environmental variation on the individual components of coexistence outcomes. We show that environmental change has the ability to influence coexistence not only through direct pathways (i.e., vital rates), but also indirect pathways (i.e., species interactions). Despite the consistency of many of the responses of these individual components to environmental variation, their combined influence on predictions of both current and future coexistence remains unclear.