Working Groups:

Towards a unified theory of biodiversity
Andrew Allen

This proposal will support the efforts of an interdisciplinary group of ecologists, physicists and mathematicians to unify three areas of theoretical ecology that have advanced rapidly over the past decade: metabolic scaling theory, neutral biodiversity theory, and spatial macroecology theory. These theories have all yielded quantitative predictions that show striking agreement with patterns observed in nature. Furthermore, all three theories derive predictions based on the same postulate that biodiversity is largely controlled by universal principles and processes that operate at the level of the individual organism, and that therefore transcend species identity. Given this fundamental point of contact among theories, and that each theory focuses on a different axis of ecological complexity (energy, stochasticity, space), considerable progress could be achieved by their integration. This working group will work towards unifying metabolic scaling theory, neutral biodiversity theory, and spatial macroecology. Our goal will not be to summarize research to date, but rather to cross disciplinary boundaries and specializations to develop a prediction-rich synthetic framework for the evolutionary and ecological assembly of biodiversity across multiple spatial and temporal scales. We anticipate a vigorous and systematic attack on the problem by researchers committed to improving their theories by confronting them with data.

Genetic monitoring: development of tools for conservation and management
Fred Allendorf and Michael Schwartz

Genetic monitoring has the potential to become a valuable tool for the management and conservation of populations. Recent rapid advances in molecular genetic techniques make it relatively easy and inexpensive to quantify temporal changes in the genetics of populations over tens or even hundreds of years. However, it is currently unknown under what circumstances genetic monitoring would provide valuable information or what genetic data are required for effective genetic monitoring. We propose a working group that will address these issues in order to provide guidance for resource managers and policy makers. We will also evaluate the potential for using genetic monitoring of candidate genes likely to be affected by climate change and other forms of stress in order to understand evolutionary responses to environmental changes. The results of this working group will be rigorous and practical guidelines for the design of genetic monitoring strategies should lead to improved assessments of population trends and evolutionary processes.

Mechanistic distribution models: energetics, fitness, and population dynamics
Lauren B. Buckley

Biologists must understand the dynamics of species distributions to address questions about community structure and to predict distributional shifts over space and time (1). Despite recent theoretical progress (2), predictions of species' ranges still rely largely on correlational methods (3, 4). Our working group will achieve a more dynamic and mechanistic understanding of species' distributions by incorporating individual energetics, fitness curves, population dynamics, and evolutionary change. Several distinct, but complementary, mechanistic models of species' distributions were recently published and share strong mechanistic and physiological bases (5-7). The working group will evaluate these mechanistic models, synthesize salient features of each, and generalize the synthetic model to include physiological adaptation (both plastic and evolutionary), species interactions, and dispersal limitations. Model development and empirical validation will focus on predicting climate-induced shifts in native ranges and the spread of invasive species using both modern and paleontological data.

Linking phylogenetic history, plant traits, and ecological processes at multiple scales
Jeannine Cavender-Bares

We propose a series of multi-disciplinary working group meetings, sponsored jointly by NCEAS, and NESCent to investigate the links between evolutionary history, plant traits, community structure and ecosystem processes. We will use data from the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network and beyond to examine the influence of phylogenetic relationships on community structure and traits relevant to ecosystem processes, at nested spatial and taxonomic scales across North America. In doing so, we will break new theoretical ground and develop new experimental and statistical protocols. Despite growing interest in understanding the influences of phylogeny on ecological processes, a synthesis across local and continental scales has yet to be attempted. Progress toward a unified understanding of the problem has been hampered by a lack of synthesis of existing phylogenetic and ecological data. A signature outcome will be a database of phylogenetic information for North American land plants and corresponding databases of plant traits and species abundances across local and large-scale environmental gradients. A second outcome will be a set of user-friendly software tools for statistical analysis of these data. These products will be used to clarify the significance of phylogenetic history and trait evolution for community organization and ecosystem processes across critical local and continental environmental gradients in North America. A North American synthesis will provide a framework for subsequent global analyses. We propose two NCEAS and two NESCent meetings between 2007 - 09, bringing together physiological, community and ecosystem ecologists with plant systematists and computational biologists to develop new theory and statistical methods widely applicable to the study of the evolution and assembly of communities.

Revisiting nutrient limitation in tropical forests
Cory C. Cleveland and Alan R. Townsend

Tropical forests have enormous ecological and societal significance. They are home to exceptional biological diversity (including humans), they profoundly affect a suite of global scale processes, and unfortunately, they are experiencing myriad effects of global environmental change. Yet, our understanding of basic ecosystem processes such as nutrient limitation in the tropics lags far behind many temperate and high latitude ecosystems, and those data that do exist have not been thoroughly synthesized. In many respects, this deficit results from a scarcity of data, but more from the fact that the tropical rain forest biome is extraordinarily complex. Tropical forests present many unique challenges to resolving questions about nutrient limitation, including the potential for limitation by multiple elements across both small and large spatial scales. Despite these challenges, all confirmed participants of our proposed NCEAS workshop believe that we are now at the point where a productive synthesis of data describing tropical nutrient cycling and limitation can and should be undertaken, and that this endeavor has the potential to generate a suite of valuable products that will be of broad utility to ecologists, biogeochemists and to society as a whole.

We therefore propose an NCEAS workshop that assembles ecologists, geologists and ecosystem modelers that collectively represent five continents and all major tropical regions to pursue three goals: 1) assemble a database and synthesize data collected using a variety of techniques to assess nutrient limitation in tropical rain forest ecosystems; 2) perform a metaanalysis of both above- and below-ground tropical nutrient limitation; and 3) further the development of conceptual and analytical ecosystem models that can better predict the fate of tropical forests in a rapidly changing environment. Our ultimate goal is to take full advantage of the NCEAS model - ranging from the opportunity to pursue the basic processes of data and conceptual synthesis, to the use of ecoinformatics resources that are unique to NCEAS - to advance our understanding of the nature of nutrient limitation in tropical forests. The time is right for a thorough synthesis, and given the importance of tropical forests to global biogeochemistry and to society as a whole, the potential value of such an effort is high.

Finding common ground in marine conservation and management
Ray Hilborn and Boris Worm

There is increasing concern among scientists and the general public about the current state of marine fisheries and their supporting ecosystems (Ludwig et al. 1993, Hilborn et al. 2003, Myers & Worm 2003, Pauly et al. 2003, Worm et al. 2006). Recent scientific progress on this topic has been partly overshadowed by significant controversy on how to assess marine resources and how to address current problems in ocean management (Jackson 2001, Myers & Worm 2005, Polachek 2005, Hilborn 2006). Marine ecologists and fisheries scientists often tend to favor contrasting approaches, and we observe that these schools of thought have polarized over time. We now recognize this situation as counterproductive and propose to address this controversy where possible. In the proposed Working Group we are trying to define common ground among marine ecologists and fishery scientists by (1) developing a unifying terminology and a common analytical framework for assessing marine fisheries and ecosystem change, (2) applying this framework to a number of representative marine ecosystems around the globe, and (3) assessing management successes and failures in order to identify a set of tools that have been proven to reverse trends of degradation in marine fish stocks and ecosystems. This process should also identify areas of continued disagreement, important for focusing future research. In a final step (to be funded by a third party) we would present our conclusions to managers, NGO and government agencies, helping them to understand the progress that has been made. The central question we are trying to answer is: how can we merge contrasting objectives, tools, and scientific criteria among marine ecology, fisheries science, and management into a unifying framework. We envision that this group will be acting as a catalyst for joining scientific forces in a quest to sustain and restore valuable marine resources.

Parasites and food webs: The ultimate missing links
Kevin Lafferty

Food webs are a conceptual underpinning for community ecology. Unfortunately, nearly all webs do not include parasites. Considering that parasitism is the most popular lifestyle on Earth, there is concern that food webs may not be complete without parasites. This working group brings together a range of experts on parasitism, food web theory, and empirical food webs to consider how parasites can be included into food-webs and to explore the consequences of their inclusion. The working group will focus on developing theoretical food webs capable of considering parasites, investigate, in detail, the few food webs that include parasites, and collate information that will allow us to assemble food-webs for a number well-studied ecosystems for which parasite data are available. Ultimately we hope to convince ecologists to incorporate parasites into all future food web studies.

Terrestrial ecosystems and climate policy
Jim Randerson, Josep Canadell, and Robert B. Jackson

Reforestation, afforestation, and avoided deforestation mitigation options influence climate at local to global scales by mechanisms in addition to their effect on stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. In some cases, for example, climate forcing from concurrent changes in albedo, evapotranspiration, and aerosols may have a larger impact regionally and globally than the net effects of greenhouse gases, yet these mechanisms are not accounted for in current policy frameworks such as the Kyoto Protocol. We propose a series of three meetings, bringing together ecosystem ecologists, climate scientists, and policy experts to synthesize recent work on tradeoffs between biogeochemical and biophysical forcing agents associated with land cover change. In a second step, we plan to draft a policy perspective that reevaluates the role of terrestrial ecosystems in climate policy.

Efficient wildlife disease control: from social network self-organization to optimal vaccination 
Peter Walsh

As large vertebrates are restricted to ever smaller populations, the threat posed by infectious disease grows. This multidisciplinary working group will investigate how information on social network connectivity can be used to make wildlife disease control programs more efficient. Using primates as a model system, we will build from studies on the way in which memory-based cognitive skills drive social network self-organization to the modeling of optimal disease control. Our modeling will be strongly data-based, using large datasets on ranging and disease prevalence\mortality from gorillas, chimpanzees and four monkey species to parameterize and validate agent-based simulation models. The datasets are from primate species that both suffer disease spillover from humans (e.g. measles, yaws, gut parasites) and act as reservoir or intermediate hosts for viruses that are of high public health (HIV, yellow fever) or bioterror (anthrax, Ebola) importance. The group's research will be focused on three overlapping topics. First, we will investigate how cognitive skills influence social network self-organization and interact with landscape processes such as habit degradation and hunting to determine patterns of disease emergence. Second, we will evaluate both generic strategies for controlling disease in protected areas and detailed case studies of optimal disease control in specific systems, including a special focus on controlling the impact of Ebola, which has killed about one third of the world's protected area gorilla population over the last 15 years. Third, the group will perform cost-benefit analyses to evaluate the cost-effectiveness and feasibility of vaccination relative to other conservation strategies, as well as make recommendations on which steps need to be taken to streamline the movement of vaccines and treatments from laboratory development to field implementation. Working group products will include both basic research on the mechanisms of disease network self-organization and more applied work on optimal disease control in real systems. A large body of primary and derived data products will be deposited in publicly accessible databases. The group has excellent diversity and balance in terms of the scientific discipline, career stage, gender, and geographic origin of its participants.

Postdoctoral Associates:

Reverse engineering of ecological networks: From the disassembly to the construction of robust networks
Stefano Allesina

Molecular biologists study how a gene works in an organism by switching it off, engineers try to replicate the functioning of a device by taking it apart and studying
how its components are wired together, archaeologists reconstruct ancient machinery by examining fragments buried for centuries: these are all examples of reverse engineering. This approach is usually precluded to ecologists given the potentially dramatic consequences of disturbing ecosystems, except in mathematical models and ‘in silico' simulations of scenarios. I intend to study the patterns of secondary extinctions in ecological networks using mathematical and simulation models. In particular, I will try to identify which building blocks or network motifs confer robustness to ecological systems. The research on networks robustness has been so far dominated by the study of ‘hubs' or most connected species, and has typically included only static analyses. I will focus not only on predator-prey interactions, but also on other major constituents of ecological networks, such as parasitism, pollination and mutualism in a dynamic context, with the ultimate goal of understanding how to assemble robust networks. The ‘hubs' based approach will be substituted by a functional approach in which the relative importance of the components of a network is explicitly evaluated.

Relative influence of fuels, climate, and ignition on fire frequency across earth's ecosystems
Jennifer K. Balch

Fire is a critical catalyst of climate and vegetation change across the globe. Future shifts in fire regimes associated with anthropogenic change may alter ecosystems and biogeochemical cycles on a global scale. Yet, modeling efforts largely ignore fire in global vegetation and climate projections. Therefore, I propose to synthesize published data on fuel production, climate, and ignition sources with reconstructed fire histories in order to investigate the determinants of fire frequency across scales and ecosystems. Rather than gauge how fire influences the biosphere, I plan to assess the factors that control the global fire cycle. This fire-centric approach will illuminate the biotic and abiotic factors that increase fire frequency. Moreover, the results will provide mechanistic insights into historical fire patterns and bolster predictions of future fire regimes in an era of accelerating global land-cover and climate change.  

Distribution dynamics in changing environments: Geographic trait variation and the potential for future adaptation
Lauren B. Buckley
Mechanistic models that link individual energetics and population dynamics offer improved predictions of species’ distribution dynamics in changing environments. Including population dynamics enables addressing the distribution implications of physiological adaptation (both plastic and evolutionary), species interactions, and dispersal limitations. I propose to first generalize an energetic optimization model across foraging strategies for ectothermic vertebrates. I will then examine current geographic trait variation for North American lizards to understand the potential for adaptation to moderate climate induced range shifts. This analysis will enable using performance optimization models and genetic models of thermal evolution to predict potential thermal adaptation following climate change. The potential for species to respond to changing climates through adaptation will be an important and little understood determinant of the biodiversity implications of environmental change. 

Using phylogenetic information to predict the relative importance of equalizing versus stabilizing mechanisms on species coexistence
Marc Cadotte

A recent thrust of ecology has been attempts to reconcile niche and neutral mechanisms as processes that structure communities. Niche mechanisms that promote coexistence can be thought of as stabilizing mechanisms where reduced niche overlap results reduced competitive interactions and thus species stably coexist. Neutral mechanisms that promote coexistence can be thought of as equalizing mechanisms where species that occupy the same niche also have similar fitness responses to local environmental conditions. While these two mechanisms represent proximate causation of coexistence patterns, we can also look to ultimate causation, namely evolution. The time since two species diverged from a common ancestor could be a predictor of the potential strength of equalizing versus stabilizing mechanisms promoting coexistence. In this research project I will be analyzing published competition experiments to see if phylogenetic relatedness can predict whether species coexistence and the mechanism of coexistence.

Disciplinary synthesis and collaboration in ecology: organizations, research groups, and work lives
John N. Parker
This is a proposal to extend and develop an ongoing investigation of current attempts to synthesize research in ecology and the social sciences. Ecology is undergoing a rapid transformation, a major component of which is the increasingly interdisciplinary scope of ecological research. Among the most salient attempts to bridge disciplines are occurring between ecology and the social sciences. Driven by the complexity of social-ecological interactions and pressing environmental concerns, attempts to merge these disciplines have become institutionalized in research centers, funding initiatives, scholarly journals and conferences. Because change has been rapid, little is known about the character of these efforts and their impact on science. These issues will be explored through a comparative, multi-method investigation of the practice and outcomes of synthetic social-ecological research. Expected outcomes include: 1) enhancing understanding of the most effective means by which to catalyze disciplinary synthesis, 2) advancing knowledge about the social and technical processes characteristic of synthetic collaborations, 3) increasing insight regarding the effect of synthetic participation on researchers’ careers, and 4) providing information on disciplinary synthesis as an agent of scientific change.

Sabbatical Fellows:

Towards a new metabolic theory of ecology
David Atkinson

The hugely influential Metabolic Theory of Ecology (MTE) has been called "ecology's big hot idea". It is based on how body size and temperature set the pace of life, hence determine the speed and duration of many biological and ecological processes. However, substantial and systematic deviations from the predictions of the MTE have prompted me to develop an alternative theory, and construct databases with data from diverse organisms ranging from microbes to mammals, to test my predictions and those of the MTE. Over a period of 9 months working and interacting with colleagues at NCEAS, I would use these databases to test assumptions and predictions of metabolic theories of ecology, including: (i) how body or key organ surface areas affect the size-scaling of oxygen consumption; (ii) how adaptation affects the response of the rate of increase of populations to temperature; and (iii) how ecosystem photosynthesis/respiration balance is affected by temperature.

Is rarity linked to extinction in the fossil record?  Synthesizing data from background and mass extinctions in U. S. Coastal Plain mollusks
Rowan Lockwood

Ecological studies suggest that rare taxa are more likely to go extinct than abundant ones, but the relationship between rarity and extinction in the fossil record has received surprisingly little attention. The purpose of this research is to examine the link between rarity (defined here to include mean abundance, spatial and temporal variability in abundance, geographic range, and habitat specificity) and extinction during both background and mass extinction intervals in the Cenozoic record of U.S. Coastal Plain mollusks. The questions I will address include: (1) Are rare taxa more likely to go extinct? (2) Does the relationship between rarity and extinction differ in mass versus background extinction intervals? and (3) Does selectivity differ according to metric of rarity? To accomplish this, I will synthesize previously processed, but unpublished, abundance, habitat, and spatial occurrence data collected by myself and colleagues, along with substantial data from the paleontological literature. This research represents one of the first attempts to explore the relationship between fossil abundance and extinction and will contribute substantially to our understanding of abundance and diversity in the Cenozoic of the U.S. Coastal Plain.

Testing the importance of ecological theory in predicting human disease: does avian diversity and community structure predict the incidence of human West Nile virus infection?
John Swaddle

West Nile virus affects bird and mammal populations worldwide and is recognized as an emerging disease of substantial public health, veterinary, and conservation concern. The virus primarily infects and replicates in birds but also affects "unintended" hosts, such as humans, when local bird communities have high levels of infection. Some bird species are much more likely to harbor the virus than others, and ecological theory predicts that the structure of local bird communities affects the amount of virus in the area and the chances of humans contracting the disease. In particular, as the diversity of local bird populations increases, the disease should be diluted among less-competent hosts and human disease incidence is predicted to decrease. Therefore, in areas with greater avian diversity, human incidence of West Nile should be lower. I will test this ecological prediction by comparing incidence of human West Nile infection with measures of avian community structure and diversity across the Eastern and Central US states from 2002-05. My own pilot data support these predictions and suggest that the completed project can be used to better predict the risk of West Nile to humans and can inform the design of more effective public health initiatives.

Evaluating the role of current semantic web technologies for improving discovery, accessibility and interoperability of ecological and environmental data
David Vieglais

The Semantic Web offers the potential for previously unrealized level of data integration for scientists working on complex, interrelated data sets such as are commonly found in biodiversity and ecological studies. The primary goal of this internship is to evaluate the practicality of using semantic web software tools to augment existing metadata catalog applications such as Metacat, and data access environments such as EarthGrid (formerly the EcoGrid of the SEEK project) being used by ecologists and environmental scientists. The practicality of providing a desktop or workgroup level semantic web node for indexing and sharing of researcher data using standard protocols such as SPARQL, the Open Archives protocol for metadata harvesting, and LSIDs (Life Sciences Identifiers) will also be examined.

The allometry of reproduction in plant populations
Jacob Weiner

Growth and reproduction are two of the most fundamental processes for plants. After a plant produces biomass, it allocates this biomass to different structures and functions, among them reproduction. Most allocation patterns can be better understood in terms of size than in terms of time, so an allometric approach to allocation is needed. While there has been much recent research on broad allometric scaling relationships among species, the allometry of reproduction within populations is a very different question, which has not been given sufficient attention. The objective of the proposed research is to gather and analyze as much relevant data as possible on the allometry of reproductive allocation within plant populations to address the following questions: (1) Is there a general pattern of size-dependent reproductive output within plant species? (2) Is there a tradeoff between the minimum size for reproduction and allocation to reproduction above that minimum size? (3) When are size-fecundity relationships plastic, and when is reproductive output solely a function of size and fixed allometric allocation patterns? These questions are fundamental to plant population ecology and evolution, and for optimizing the use of resources in plant production systems.

Distributed Graduate Seminars:

Ushering in a new era of functional ecology:  dynamics in a changing environment
Elsa Cleland

This distributed graduate seminar will engage graduate students in asking fundamental questions about the linkages among environmental change, niche-based functional traits and threshold/divergence dynamics in community structure. Plant functional traits are increasingly being utilized in an effort to generalize species and ecosystem responses to environmental changes, as well as to address fundamental questions in evolutionary ecology. They also present a tool to discern niche or deterministic, convergence, and divergence, and stochastic dynamics in communities. The seminar will focus on emerging areas of research that are advancing functional ecology. Each institution will use datasets that detail community and functional structure from several environmental change manipulative experiments and related observational datasets along environmental gradients. The capstone NCEAS meeting will combine analyses and techniques from each institution to generate predictions regarding national-level responses of plant communities to environmental change such as invasive species and nitrogen enrichment.

The role of marine protected areas in ecosystem-based management: examining the science and politics of an ocean conservation strategy
Robert Pavia and James Lindholm

Recent reports by the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy and the Pew Oceans Commission recommend specific actions necessary to drive advances in ocean governance, including the use of marine protected areas (MPAs) as tools for ecosystem-based management. With coastal development, pollution, and resource extraction pressures on MPAs increasing, national and international efforts are focusing on developing MPAs in the context of the ecosystems, both terrestrial and marine, in which they occur.

We will conduct an NCEAS Distributed Graduate Seminar dedicated to clarifying the role of MPAs as tools for ecosystem-based management. The National Marine Sanctuary Program, one of the primary MPA management programs in U.S. Federal waters, will serve as a vehicle for this exploration. Graduate students from Hawaii to New Hampshire will examine how our growing scientific understanding of ecosystem processes within MPAs, and evolving ocean-observing capabilities, can allow us to manage MPAs as integral components of the ecosystems in which they reside.