Towards a Trait-Based View of the Study of Biological Diversity: New Insights to Deciphering Diversity Gradients and 'Scaling Up' to Ecosystem-Level Processes

Speaker:
Brian Enquist

Event Description:

The study of biodiversity has focused on documenting variation in species richness. However, an increasing number of studies demonstrate that this focus has constrained progress. As a measure, species richness is removed from the forces that generate and maintain it and from theory developed to explain it. The field could rapidly move forward if it embraced: (i) quantifying trait, genetic/phylogenetic, and demographic differences instead of species richness; (ii) highlighting patterns that describe how these differences are expressed across differing size, spatial, and temporal scales and (iii) searching for species-independent shared principles. Together, these approaches provide a more quantitative, and predictive framework for biodiversity science, are more akin to what Darwin originally envisioned, and can better assess proposed mechanisms underlying diversity. Here I present new research findings focused on utilizing new trait-based approaches to address long-standing questions in ecology. I focus on two specific areas – First, I will show how trait-based approaches yield new insight into the relative importance of ecological and evolutionary forces across diversity gradients. Second, I will present new theoretical work that attempts to show how trait-based approaches can yield novel predictions for how changes in trait composition of populations and communities will ramify to influence ecosystem-level processes. I show how new ecoinformatics approaches has enabled us to visualize functional diversity on a scale not matched before. will conclude with a focus on the challenges that lay ahead in developing a more predictive ecology and comparative biology by using trait/phylogenetic approaches.

Sponsors:
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Website:
http://eebweb.arizona.edu/news/Monday_Seminar_details.asp?p=50002724