OEB Seminar Series: Andrew Davies
Date and Time
Location
Assistant Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
Harvard University
Animal-landscape interactions on a changing planet
Abstract: How do animals shape our planet? Do their roles matter when compared with other seemingly obvious and dominant drivers such as climate, soils, topography or plants? These have been core questions in ecology for over half a century, yet the contributions made by animals to large-scale environmental processes and patterns remain elusive and difficult to quantify. The overarching goal of my research program is to measure and understand these animal-driven contributions to large-scale environmental processes, and to compare their magnitude to abiotic and anthropogenic drivers, enabling a full-system understanding of how ecosystems function and how they might change in response to global change. In this talk, I will draw on the fields of community and ecosystem ecology, animal behavior, and remote sensing to explore multiple facets of animal-ecosystem interactions in a spatially explicit manner, examining how animals interact with the environment and each other to affect ecosystem functioning at landscape scales.