International Research Fellow Award: Theoretical approaches to understanding the structure of ecological communities

Klausmeier, Christopher A, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

0076200 The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Christopher Klausmeier with support for 12 months to work with Drs. Peter Bossard and Elena Litchman at EAWAG/ETH Limnological Research Centre in Kastanienbaum, Switzerland, Dr. Tadeusz Kawecki at the University of Basel, and Dr. Ulf Dieckmann at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna, Austria. The topic of his research is the theoretical approach to understanding the structure of ecological communities. The goal of this project is to develop flexible theoretical techniques which would allow community structure to self-organize from a range of potentially interacting species. These approaches have been pioneered by Dr. Dieckmann's group at IIASA for use in evolutionary studies. With collaborators at EAWAG, Dr. Klausmeier will apply these techniques to mechanistic models of a particular kind of ecological system: lake plankton communities. He will determine how community structure depends on environmental parameters such as nutrient loading, then test these predictions against data from a range of lakes. He expects to develop new general mathematical techniques for studying community assembly. By applying them to lake plankton communities, he hopes to expand understanding of how the structure of these communities depends on environmental parameters and how they will respond to human impacts.