The print version of our special issue “The ecological niche as a window to biodiversity” has just been published by the Journal of Biogeography. As pointed out by Steve Higgins, Christine Römermann, and Bob O’Hara in their introduction to the special issue:
The papers in this special issue arose from two workshops entitled ‘The ecological niche as a window to biodiversity’ held on 26–30 July 2010 and 24–27 January 2011 in Arnoldshain near Frankfurt, Germany. The workshops combined recent advances in our empirical and theoretical understanding of the niche with advances in statistical modelling, with the aim of developing a more mechanistic theory of the niche.
The result is a, as I find, really nice collection of papers, many of which deal with the question of how to include more biotic processes in SDMs, and in general how to move from correlative to more mechanistic distribution models.
I have already highlighted a number of papers from this issue in previous blog posts on Inference with process-oriented species distribution models, Connecting dynamic vegetation models to data – an inverse perspective, Correlation and process in species distribution models: bridging a dichotomy, but have a look at the table of contents to get a full overview.
theoretical ecology 
Pingback: Process, correlation and parameter fitting in species distribution models: a response to Kriticos et al. « theoretical ecology