Ushering in a new era of functional ecology: Dynamics in a changing environment

• Elsa E. Cleland
• Scott L. Collins
• Katharine N. Suding

Abstract
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.