On Thursday, September 25 @ 11am ET, join us for a virtual scientific seminar by Cary Institute's Dr. Vanessa Rubio. Understanding the processes that maintain species richness and abundance is particularly relevant for highly diverse communities such as tropical forests. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the maintenance of many species and forest functionalities in a continuum between neutral- and niche-based frameworks. Integrating functional traits into community ecology has improved and refined our ability to interpret the main processes responsible for plant community assembly. In particular, niche differentiation by a few key functional groups has been suggested to play an essential role in capturing the emergent patterns observed in tropical forests.
In a completely stochastic framework, trees should die randomly regardless of their taxonomic and functional identity. However, research on tropical giant trees shows that species-specific functional traits play an important role in driving interspecific variation in mortality. In this seminar, Dr. Rubio will present research on (1) the integration of functional groups into forest dynamics using the neutral- and niche-based frameworks, and (2) the interspecific variation of giant tree mortality and its functional basis.
Free and open to all. Registration required via Eventbrite.
