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
Tuesday, Oct 15
Intro, definitions, some history.
We'll also play around with a simple dataset in R.
Lecture Slides
Tuesday, Oct 22
Paper discussion 2: Can we begin to infer community assembly processes from patterns?
Reading: Leibold and Mikkelson (2002)
Thursday, Oct 24
Paper discussion 3: Do communities actually exist?
Tuesday, Oct 29
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.
Thursday, Oct 31
Brief presentations and discussion.
Is the world Clementsian/Gleasonian/neutral/other?