Species removal dampens the scale dependency of ecological determinism and stochasticity in coastal communities.

Deterministic and stochastic processes control community dynamics. However, the responses of both processes to the loss of foundation species, which strongly influence community dynamics across spatial scales, are unclear. We experimentally examined how spatial extent and foundation species removal affect rocky-intertidal community dynamics over three years in eight field sites spanning ~1000 km along the southeastern Pacific. The normalised stochasticity ratio (NST), which distinguishes between stochastic (>50%) and deterministic (