The researchers conducted a 15-year experiment on rodents to see how changing species interactions affect patterns in plant communities. They found that altering seed predation by rodents had a significant impact on species composition, but not on richness or total abundance in most cases. However, removing all rodents did lead to changes in winter community abundance and richness, which in turn affected macroecological patterns like species abundance and diversity. This suggests that local processes indirectly influence these patterns through properties like abundance and richness.