Integrating species traits into species pools: A multi-scale approach to understanding community assembly

Washington University, Saint Louis MO

Investigators

Abstract

Human activities are profoundly altering ecosystems worldwide through changes to natural disturbance regimes and the availability of nutrients. The ability to predict the effects of human activities on biodiversity remains poor because biodiversity responds differently to similar changes in environmental conditions. This project tackles an unexplored mechanism for observed highly variable responses among communities, which is the diversity of species traits in a region. The project will contribute new insights into the responses of biodiversity to human perturbations. It will simultaneously advance conservation, management, and restoration of human-altered ecosystems both through application of research results and through new educational and training programs. Activities will include a workshop to bring together land managers and scientists from local, state, and federal institutions to identify and discuss key challenges in conservation and restoration; training of high school students, teachers, and undergraduate students in science and field research; and dissemination of a classroom module to high school teachers focused on environmental restoration and sustainability. The researchers will conduct a landscape-scale field experiment to examine why the diversity and composition of plant communities change in response to fire and nutrient availability in Ozark forest ecosystems. Within this large-scale experiment, plant communities will be assembled from pools of species that vary in diversity of seed, root, stem, and leaf traits. Experimental data will be combined with spatial analyses and simulation models to test how trait diversity influences the relative importance of ecological processes underlying plant community assembly. This multi-scale approach will advance our understanding of how regional variation in species-trait diversity, landscape-scale disturbances, and local variation in environmental conditions independently and interactively shape patterns of biodiversity.