The study looked at different ways to analyze data on ecological communities to see if more detailed information could be gained while still being able to compare ecosystems. They focused on species abundance distributions and individual size distributions in fish and bird communities in the United States and Australia. By analyzing these distributions, they found new environmental associations that were not seen when using traditional diversity indices. They also discovered that individual size distributions were more closely linked to environmental factors than species abundance distributions. This suggests that focusing on size in ecological analyses could help create general models of ecological communities.