Understanding ecological community structure and its effects on ecosystem function and services has long been a goal of ecologists. Historically, a strong focus has been placed on species richness as the primary metric to describe communities, which has branched into many subfields of ecology including coexistence dynamics and biodiversity-ecosystem function relationships. However, it is increasingly clear that species richness is not sufficient to describe communities or the functions that they support. The ecological data revolution can pave the way for increasing our understanding of ecological communities and their functions, by providing information beyond species richness at spatial and temporal scales never possible before. However, harnessing the power of this data requires a concerted effort to develop frameworks and synthetic understandings of how a variety of metrics can be utilized to determine drivers of community structure and function. A hierarchy of approaches has been proposed to better generalize and increase predictability of community changes in response to environmental factors and the corresponding link to ecosystem function: (1) alterations in species relative abundances such as changes in dominance, (2) changes in community-level functional trait expression, and (3) variation in genetic and/or phylogenetic relatedness as a proxy for trait diversity. Dominant plant species account for the majority of production in an ecosystem, and their removal results in a loss of ecosystem functions. Therefore, focusing on turnover in dominant species or changes in community evenness may serve to simplify community dynamics and make linking community with ecosystem production changes more tractable. Beyond species identities, functional traits have been put forward as a “holy grail” approach capable of generalizing the link between community and functional processes across scales, however many untested assumptions of the role of functional traits in community remain. Finally, different suites of traits can lead to similar ecosystem function, and incorporating information on genetic and phylogenetic relatedness can increase ecological understanding by serving as a proxy for trait differences or similarities. Using these approaches individually or in combination can lead to an improved understanding of how communities are structured and the consequences for the ecosystem functions and services that humans depend on. In this session, speakers will address these three key components of ecological communities, with the goal of promoting a shift from our current focus on species richness as the dominant metric to describe ecological communities.