BIOLOGY SEMINARS | SPRING 2018
Case Prager ‘08
University of Vermont
Impacts of climate and multiple dimensions of biodiversity on arctic and alpine ecosystem carbon dynamics
As human-altered landscapes now dominate our earth, greater emphasis has been placed on understanding which species decline, persist, or increase in these altered or newly created habitats, and the consequences of changing biological diversity for ecosystem and Earth-system functioning. This body of work has grown exponentially since its emergence just two decades ago, and a great amount of effort has been placed on developing theory and empirical methods to describe the nature of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem function (BEF) and the mechanisms (e.g., selection effect and niche complementarity) thought to underlie this relationship. While the basic relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem function is well studied, three advances in BEF are under intense investigation and warrant further attention. These are (1) the importance of multiple dimensions of biodiversity, (2) the importance of multiple functions and the variability of function, and (3) the importance of realistic changes in biodiversity, such as those driven by global change. Here, we focus on leveraging information about environmental variation, both experimental and observational, and multiple dimensions of biodiversity in order to better understand the ecosystem-level consequences of shifting patterns of biodiversity.
Thursday, April 5th
BioScience 113
11:45 a.m.
Email oasin@oxy.edu to sign up for lunch with the speaker after the seminar!
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