[LTER-students] Invitation to participate in an ESA OOS session "Functional trait based approaches and disturbance"

[Ross Boucek]

Dear LTER student body,

Ashley Asmus and I are organizing an OOS session for ESA 2016. The purpose
of the OOS is to develop a better understanding of under what conditions do
functional trait approaches best predict or, conversely, fail to predict
community and ecosystem responses to disturbance.  The session description
is below. If you are interested in participating in this OOS, please send
us a tentative title for your talk.

Following the OOS, we aim to publish a paper centered around this topic.
If you would like, please share this email with other interested parties.

*Session Description follows:*

Maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem function is a critical challenge in
ecology, particularly where humans have altered the disturbance regime via
changes to climate, nutrient cycling and land use. Ecologists could inform
proactive conservation practices by forecasting the consequences of
disturbances; however, developing generalized predictions at the community
level has shown to be quite difficult. One promising avenue is an analysis
of functional traits: decomposing taxonomic communities into ecologically
meaningful characteristics (Webb et al. 2010, Mouillot et al 2013). A
handful of studies have shown that, relative to analyses of taxonomic
community structure, functional trait-based analysis can provide more
robust, universal predictions of ecosystem function following a
disturbance. For instance, extreme weather events predictably restructure
pelagic plankton communities according to motility (Özkundakci et al. 2015)
and tropical fish communities according to temperature and salinity
tolerance (Boucek et al. 2014). Despite the hypothesized benefit of using
trait-based approaches to explain and predict community changes from
disturbance, few studies adopt this approach relative to more traditional
taxonomic community analyses. System-specific caveats can pose significant
hurdles; for example, problems of scale in terrestrial ecology (Ames et al.
2014) or dynamic genetic processes in microbial ecology (Boon et al. 2014).
In this session, we use case studies from diverse systems to ask: (1) are
there universal functional trait responses to disturbance? (2) when does a
functional trait response framework fail to predict ecosystem responses to
disturbance?


Thanks for your time!

Ross Boucek M.S.
Research Assistant
PhD candidate Department of Biology
Florida International University *Miami's Public Research University*
Long Term Ecological Research Network graduate student co-chair
American Fisheries Society Network student sub-unit president elect
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