讲座题目：Transfer functions, scale-transition theory, and consequences of spatial patterns for coexistence in species rich plant communities

主讲人：Thorsten Weigand

主持人：沈国春 副教授 

开始时间：2021-6-16（周三）下午3:00

讲座地址：腾讯会议 656240969 

主办单位：生态与环境科学学院、科技处 

报告人简介：

Thorsten Wiegand, a theoretical ecologist with more than 25 years research experience in question-driven research in biodiversity and conservation. His research centers broadly on spatial ecology and the investigation of the role of species interactions, spatial processes and structures for population and community dynamics, community assembly, and biodiversity. His primary research goals are to broaden the theory of population and community ecology and to integrate them with landscape ecology to encompass an explicit consideration of spatially distributed processes, and to develop methods to adapt individual-based simulation models optimally for ecological applications. His work has been published in Nature, Science, PNAS, Nature Ecology & Evolution, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Ecology letter, BMC Ecology, Methods in ecology and Evolution, Ecology etc.

报告内容简介: 

       Ecology cannot yet fully explain why so many tree species coexist in natural communities such as tropical forests. A major difficulty is to link individual-level processes to community dynamics. In this talk I develop transfer functions to transport the essence of the outcome of microscopic, individual-level processes into macroscopic Lotka-Volterra style multi-species models. Placing scale-transition theory into the context of individual-based models and spatial analysis of large ForestGEO census data sets reveals that spatial patterns can lead to a stabilizing positive fitness-density covariance. This finding has important consequences for ecological theory because it shows, in contrast to the prevalent view, that spatial patterns alone can lead to coexistence of multiple species. Linking spatial statistics with individual-based models and analytical theories of community dynamics offers new avenues for explaining species coexistence and calls for rethinking community ecology through a spatial lens.