Wednesday Daily Wrapup

Paper ideas reporting back

1) Framework - Macroecology + Macroevolution

  • Lead - Brian McGill
  • Idea for a quick and dirty paper
  • Call for macroecologists and macroevolutionary biologists to work more closely together even though there has been some progress lately with the eco-evo modelling stuff that’s been happening lately.
    • We’ve seen lots of work on the micro-micro world, but we want to put together the macro-macro world.
  • Two figures that are already pretty well defined.
  • A couple figures with ecologcial and evolutionary variables coming together as a means for generating hypotheses.
  • Maybe aim for GEB

2) Invasiveness - Nativeness + Invasiveness

  • Lead - Jairo Patino
  • Compare across different archipelagos the level of species richeness components (native, endemic, exotic) to see how SAR varies.
    • Compare across taxonomic groups: Plants, lizards, birds, arthropods
  • Richness compared to total area of the island, but also with respect to area of habitat type for different taxonomic groups.
  • Got ideas for HI, Canaris, Azores, Galapagos, and whatever else they get hands on.
    • Use checklists, but also supplementing as much as possible.
  • What kinds of data:
    • Species richness per island for different groups
    • Vegetation types
    • (Holger Kreft & Global vegetational network have a butt-load of island plant native/invasive data).

“I have a chloroplast bias.”

2.5) Role of functional groups in plot-level abundance and invasions.

  • Lead - ? (Proposed by Paulo Borges)

3) Alpha/Beta - The role of diversification in shaping local community structure on islands.

  • Lead - Luke Mahler
  • Kinds of data:
    • Whether an island has in situ speciation or not w/in an island
    • Island characteristics (age/area)
    • Island richness
    • Plot level presence/absence (Alpha diversity)
    • Also would be neat to know whether species are native or introduced
    • Things that would be nice to have
      • Would be nice to have Abundance w/in plots
      • Also climate, elevation, vegetation
      • Also genetic data (Fst)

4) Alpha/Beta - Alpha/beta area curves under a neutral island model.

  • Lead - Ben Peter
  • Community structure from a neutral perspective
  • How alpha/beta diversity would change as area increases?
  • Discussed coalescence models
  • Perhaps doing a spatially explicit model would be better
  • Force immigration from the mainland
  • You can trick a spatially explicit model by making patches localities and implementing a strange dispersal kernel.

“As long as its neutral its possible.” - J. Rosindell’s new catch phrase.

“And would you want data?…“ … “No.”

5) Island Ontogeny - Effect of island ontogeny/habitat dynamics on diversity patterns

  • Lead - Rampal Etienne
  • Not so much modelling, but really can we detect that from data!
  • Is there an effect of island ontogeny on island diversity patterns?
  • Start with ontogeny but maybe expand to any kind of habitat dynamics.
  • Can you get a better fit to a model that incorporates ontogeny than a model that doesn’t.
    • DAISIE assumes the island is there and there’s a constant effect on the rates.
  • Perhaps there are more species than you should have because of an extinction debt for some reason.
  • Comparing across taxonomic groups and across archipelagos.
  • Kinds of data:
    • Island ontogeny data (really good data on how area changed)
      • Island age or substrate age?
      • Desirable: an area/time relationship.
    • All the other data (phylogenies, etc, etc)
    • Jairo/Rosie have lots of data that would be appropriate for this.

6) Radiation - Why radiate?

  • Lead - ? et al (but see James Rosindell)
  • Whether certain taxa are special, what causes them to radiate, whether something causes them to radiate in islands.
  • Kinds of data:
    • Phylogenies big enough at the species level to contain lots of stuff from the mainland
    • Slice the phylogenies up into clades of equal age and compare island clades to mainland clades to see if there’s anything special about them that caused them to radiate.
    • Other nice things: Abundances and Fst (in the spirit of the workshop)
  • Could you use Fst to differentiate or identify taxonomic bias (radiation by oversplitting).
    • “Speciation-by-taxonomist”

“‘Just why radiate’ is enough.”

7) Radiations - Mechanistic model of radiations

  • Lead - ? et al
  • Uber-MESS model (Look at all the things the mess model can doe).
  • Kinds of data:
    • Loads of data

8) MESS

  • Lead - Isaac Overcast
  • Depending on what we add this could fold in the mechanistic model from above.

9) Review paper on macroecology and paleontology

  • Lead - Katie Wagner
  • Review of concepts from paleontology and macroecology and ecological theory

10) Do abundant island clades radiate more than rares?

  • Lead - Andy Rominger
  • Using data from islands to explore whether abundant species radiate more than rare species
  • (This could be folded in with the previous idea).
  • Kinds of data:
    • Plot level abundance data
    • Metadata about islands
    • Phylogenies for taxa within plots (if they are available)
    • Population genetic data to evaluate constancy of abundance through time
    • Environment too

“I looked at it again and I found it.”

“Question mark doesn’t imply lack of enthusiasm.”

“If you’ve got ten, then you might as well go to eleven.”

11) Does diversity beget diversity?

  • Lead - ? (Raised by Andy Rominger and 2nd’d by James)

12) Applying METE to volcanic archiplagos

  • Lead - ? (Raised by Paulo Borges)

General Chatter

“There are some new heterogeneities that we need to account for.”