messDiv

We will be hosting several working groups at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv).

A central challenge in understanding the origins of biodiversity is that, while ecological phenomena occur across observably short time periods, the longer-term drivers and outcomes of these ecological processes can often only be indirectly infered. We propose to develop inferential models at the interface between macroecology, macroevolution and population-level processes, and apply them to data from geological or ecological chronosequences that present communities of different ages. Inferences from these snapshots in time thereby allow for model validation and a link between direct observational methods for local communities and models that make indirect inferences underlying community history using genetic and phylogenetic patterns. The workshop will use data from multiple insular systems, each comprising replicated sites that range from $<$ 500 years to $>$ 5 million years. We propose to directly link ecological theories and models of community composition and comparative population genomics, all within a temporal framework. Our approach is to build a unified model bridging theory from phylogenetic and comparative population genomics with ecological theory, so as to understand the history underlying patterns of species diversity. This model will then be used to make joint predictions of species abundances and genetic diversities over time. We will then test this model with data collected across diverse taxa and a range of systems that provide snapshots in time. This unified approach will bridge ecological and evolutionary theory to elucidate processes responsible for origins and maintenance of species diversity and provide a framework for making predictions about biodiversity dynamics.

You can read about the preliminary mechanics of this model here.

This is of course based on a large existing literature which we summarize here.

Participants