Coreen Forbes: Exit Seminar

SCALING FROM SPECIES' TRAITS TO THE MAINTENANCE OF BIODIVERSITY IN A CHANGING WORLD

Abstract: Patterns of biodiversity and the processes generating them vary over scales of time, space, and ecological organization. This scale dependency is one of the foremost obstacles to understanding how biodiversity responds to global change. Species’ traits are a common feature of many scaling theories and may help to unify our understanding of ecology across scales. My work draws from The Metabolic Theory of Ecology, Modern Coexistence Theory, and Metacommunity Theory to understand how species’ traits relate to the maintenance of diversity under global change. I combine theory with experiments in which I manipulated temperature, a key factor in climate change, and distance between habitat patches, a key element of land use change and fragmentation in two study systems. In a pond zooplankton system, I test how species’ thermal traits determine population and community responses to temperature. In an eelgrass community, I test whether invertebrate dispersal limitation affects local diversity.

BRC Room 224

Zoom link for remote attendees: https://ubc.zoom.us/j/64834344247?pwd=eEZhWm9sQnpBa25ZWFZpNXNrUWhhQT09

Meeting ID: 648 3434 4247

Passcode: 558330