OEB Seminar Series: Evan Fricke
Date and Time
Location
Evan Fricke
Ecologist and Research Scientist
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
MIT
From ecological networks to ecosystem functioning: mapping global changes in animal functional roles
Abstract: Changes to animal biodiversity often impact ecosystem functioning by altering networks of ecological interactions among species. Yet empirical data on species interactions and their links to ecosystem functioning are relatively limited. This hampers the ability to quantify how animal biodiversity changes affect ecological networks and ecosystem functioning at large spatiotemporal scales. In this talk, I will discuss how we have used data synthesis and machine learning to predict species interactions and their links to ecosystem function based on species traits. I will show how such models can be used for analyses of changing ecological networks and animal functional roles over space and time. As examples of this approach, I will present an analysis of global seed dispersal decline and its implications for plants’ ability to track climate change, a project to hindcast mammal food webs globally since the Late Pleistocene, and a project to evaluate how declining seed dispersal functioning affects the carbon accumulation potential of regrowing tropical forests.
Host: OEB Postdoctoral Researchers