Approximatively 25 chemical elements are essential for the maintenance,
growth and reproduction of all living organisms. Hence, the movement,
distribution, and relative proportions of those elements on the
landscape should influence the structure and functioning of biological
communities. Yet our basic understanding for the spatial distribution of
elements across landscapes is limited. Here, we propose to apply tools
from community and landscape ecology to study spatial patterns in
elements. We illustrate this framework using tree leaves elemental
composition and demonstrate how spatial grain and spatial dissimilarity
of elements interact leading to predictable patterns in elemental
distributions at various spatial scales. Meanwhile, further analysis
revealed that potassium and calcium are the most important elemental
contributors to spatial dissimilarity in leaf elements, raising new
questions about their role in, or response to, distributions of
biodiversity and ecosystem functions. Our framework provides a way to
integrate abiotic and biotic processes, demonstrating how we can use
community metrics to investigate variability of individual elements
across landscapes. We conclude by hypothesizing that changes in the
evenness or beta-diversity of elements should reflect the structure of
biotic communities, providing a long-sought mechanistic link between
community and ecosystem processes that can be measured directly in the
field.