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NJIT Mathematical Biology Seminar

Tuesday, October 14, 2008, 4:00pm
Cullimore Hall 611
New Jersey Institute of Technology

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Quantifying species functional diversity with convex hull volume

Dan Bunker

Department of Biological Sciences, NJIT

Biological diversity has been shown to increase rates of ecosystem function, such as primary production. While species diversity has often been the basis for these experiments, theory makes clear that functional diversity must drive these effects. Prior efforts to quantify functional diversity have focused on the variance of the functional traits of species, which assumes that maximizing the difference between species' traits will maximize their ability to exploit resources. However, we argue that the opportunity to maximize resource capture relies on maximizing the amount of trait space that is occupied by the community. We propose a convex hull approach to quantifying trait space occupancy that sums the convex hull volume occupied by the individual species of the community. We compare the convex hull approach to existing metrics, and consider computational, theoretical, and methodological issues.