Community structure and assembly across scales

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 1

Intro, definitions, some history.

We'll also play around with a simple dataset in R.

Lecture Slides

Tuesday, Nov 6

Paper discussion 1: Niches across scales

Thursday, Nov 8

Paper discussion 2: Can we begin to infer community assembly processes from patterns?

Null-Beta Code

Tuesday, Nov 13

Paper discussion 3: Do communities actually exist?

Reading group 1: Ricklefs (2008)

Reading group 2: Brooker et al. (2009)

Thursday, Nov 15

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.

data (culi)

data(F41)

data(SNP hotspots)

data(Kruger_grass_data)

data(Kruger_tree_data)

data(COWEETA)

data(SRELZoops)

Tuesday, Nov 27

Brief presentations and discussion.

 

Is the world Clementsian/Gleasonian/neutral/other?