A subset of the Community Dynamics Working Group reconvened at NCEAS from March 23 - 28, 1998.  We focused on two activities:  (1) finalizing analyses begun during the first three meetings and drafting the papers that report these analyses and (2) writing a paper presenting a new conceptual framework for thinking about community variability.

(1) Polishing up ongoing analyses from earlier working group meetings

• We finalized the datasets and began work on a more formal method of documenting our value-added datasets. This included correcting some errors, adding more data for several lakes at the Dorset Research Centre, and adding 49 more lake-years of data on reference lakes at the Experimental Lakes Area.

• We produced outlines for papers by Cottingham et al. and Micheli et al. based on work THAT presented at last summer’s ESA meeting and expanded during the November 1997 meeting of our working group.  We anticipate that these papers will be submitted during summer 1998.
• We made progress on several of the other papers and projects that are still in development, including

 
•   Rusak et al.: comparisons of variability in total, cladoceran, copepod and rotifer densities in reference vs. manipulated lakes.
•     Klug et al.:  can you predict summer zooplankton from spring conditions?
• Wootton, Klug, Micheli et al.:  Do communities converge to predictable “states” during the summer stratified season?  Is zooplankton community structure more predictable at the beginning or at the end of the summer season?
• Wootton et al.:  fits of a multivariate AR(1) time series model to data on zooplankton functional groups
• Fischer et al.: Does acidification history play a role of in determining community sensitivity in whole-lake acidification experiments?  Are population responses consistent (occur at same pH)?  Or do they vary with history?
• Cottingham, Micheli et al.:  relationships of community variability to species richness in zooplankton data

(2) Ad Hoc Working Group on Community Variability
 

• * We also convened a 10-member working group that met at intervals throughout the week.  This “ad hoc” group was composed of working group members and local NCEAS and UCSB scientists, all of whom are currently postdocs or grad students.  The primary output is a conceptual framework for how to think about community variability. 
  
  
• * By the last day of the meeting, we had produced a rough draft of a paper (ideally for Trends in Ecology and Evolution) that describes our conceptual framework and how it might be applied within ecology.  The manuscript is currently undergoing review by all co-authors, and will be submitted to TREE on 1 May 1998 after “friendly” review by several NCEAS residents as well as off-site colleagues.

Janet M. Fischer (postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University)
Jennifer L. Klug (graduate student at the University of Wisconsin)
James A. Rusak (graduate student at York University)
J. Timothy Wootton (assistant professor at the University of Chicago)
Ginny L. Eckert (graduate student at UCSB) 


Participants from NCEAS:

Kathryn L. Cottingham
Fiorenza Micheli
Jordi Bascompte
Ottar Bjornstad
Timothy H Keitt
Bruce E. Kendall

Official Motivator:

Peter Kareiva