This module will focus on the role of niche vs. neutral processes in community assembly, and explore how analyses of diversity across scales in observational datasets may be used to make inferences about mechanisms structuring ecological communities.
Date
Activity and Goals
Reading and homework
Thursday, Nov 2
Communities, niches, Clements, Gleason, Hutchinson, Tilman, Hubbell. Review of people, definitions and ideas. Plant cover community matrix: SNPplants
Slides: Nov 2 slides
Tuesday, Nov 14
Paper discussion 3
Reading group 1:Ricklefs (2008)
Reading group 2: Brooker et al. (2009)
Thursday, Nov 16
Working with actual data. The ‘Elements of metacommunity Structure’ approach of Liebold and Mikkelson (2002) will be applied to three datasets using R package metacom.
Tuesday, Nov 28
Brief presentations on findings of data analysis.