Wednesday was a crazy day, bouncing between talks and
one-on-one meetings. This is what ESA is about: connecting with friends and
colleagues, and seeing exciting new science. There were a bunch of fun talks
that introduced new ideas and concepts, or made connections between different
approaches. Some of these talks included Dylan Craven, who linked plant
functional traits to performance in secondary successional forests in Panama.
In Nicholas Gotelli’s talk, he tried to reconcile thousands of museum ant
records with ecological surveys to estimate abundance, distribution and numbers
of ant species in the north east USA. Sam Scheiner discussed a new approach to
combine phylogeny and traits at the community level.
There were also some talks that seemed to really resonate
with me, and the audiences attending them. Katherine Richgels gave a very
interesting talk on trematode metacommunities, where the primary patches
(snails) live in other patches (ponds). The primary patches have unique
dynamics, including movement. The environment and host abundance seem to
strongly determine trematode community patterns.
Bruce Menge astounded his audience with a new hypothesis:
the ‘intermittent upwelling hypothesis’ which states that ecological process
rates should be maximized at intermittent upwelling coastal zones. He ran
experiments on coasts around the world and showed that recruitment, herbivory
and predation rates were all maximized when upwelling was intermittent.
Cecil Albert showed how a model can predict the effects of
global change and landscape alteration. She used a ‘sandwich’ modeling approach,
where vegetation structure is sandwiched between climate change influences at
large scale and landscape change at smaller scales. The resulting vegetation
changes can be used to predict responses from specific indicator species or
ecosystem function. She then showed how different scenarios of landuse change
(random habitat removal, zoning and protecting corridors) can result in
different responses in indicator species.
Finally, Caroline Tucker* gave a great talk on the effects
of global warming on changes in flowering time in competitive communities. Most people assume that plants will
flower earlier in a warmer world, but these predictions ignore competitive effects.
Using a set of linked growth and phenology models, she showed that indeed
plants increase growth and flower earlier with warming in the absence of
competition. However, once you allow the species to compete, the advance in
flowering time is unequal. Early species, which are generally released from
competition will flower earlier. So too will late species which tend to be good
competitors. However, intermediate species do not advance their flowering due
to competition.
*Yes this is our Caroline Tucker.
**Caroline has been on me to post my Wed. talk summary for
two days.
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