Session speakers
Peter AdlerWell-known for his empirical and theoretical work on coexistence theory and neutral theory, Peter has amassed a long-term dataset of plant community structure that lends itself well to the exploration of when and where biotic interactions are important for temporal dynamics and persistence.
Personal Website David HarrisComing off of the development of a machine learning method to generate realistic ecological communities, Dave is now working on new ways to estimate species interactions from observational data. Given the preponderance of observation-based distributional data and the difficulty of experimentally determining species interactions, methods like Dave’s will be a necessary tool for including species interactions into SDMs.
Personal Website | Github Daniel KatzBookending our session, an impressive experimental study, Daniel will be speaking about a portion of his dissertation research exploring how herbivory and disease affect species migrating beyond their traditional range limits (more about his dissertation research).
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James CLarkJim’s extensive body of work on forests, biodiversity & global change is difficult to summarize, but of particular interest is Jim’s recent work on joint species distribution models, developing a method for modeling individual species distributions as a function of the community context. JSDMs are emerging in the literature as a way to indirectly account for the and represent a significant improvement over single-species models.
Personal Website phoebe zarnetskeA result of a similar session at the AAAS annual meeting in 2012, Phoebe & her collaborators published an influential review of the ways that certain species interactions can amplify the impacts of climate change on communities (see also Blois et al. 2013). In her talk (& recent paper), Phoebe will be addressing the important question of at which scale are biotic interactions important for setting a species range limit, and thus important to model in SDMs.
Personal Website Jennifer WeaverIn one of the few examples that includes both experimental and observational data in SDMs, Jennifer & colleagues have conducted an extensive meta-analysis that links the strength and sign of pairwise species interactions at the plot scale to their larger distributional patterns.
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Janneke HillE Ris LambersBy blending the experimental and the theoretical, Janneke’s strong empirical research program provides insights to the ways that plat communities may respond to climate change. Using elevational gradients in climate as a proxy for climate change, Janneke’s work is revealing fascinating conclusions about the role of biotic interactions and dispersal for species living at the edge of their range limits.
Personal Website William GodsoeOne of our favorite papers on species interactions & distributions is Godsoe & Harmon 2012. SDM research in general has been criticized for not having a strong basis in theory; in this paper, Godsoe & Harmon link outcomes from theoretical generalized consumer-resource competition models to explicit presences and absences in the broader landscape. Also see Godsoe et al. 2015 and Godsoe et al. in press for more recent publications on the topic.
Personal Website Kaitlin MaguireThis session's only paleoecologist, Kaitlin has explored the drivers of species distributions on a much longer time scale than any of our other speakers. Kaitlin’s current work is at the very leading edge of SDM research, moving beyond individual species response to climate change to modeling community response by incorporating species interactions.
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Note: all photos from the academic websites for each speaker
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