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NJIT Mathematical Biology Seminar

Thursday, April 3, 2008, 13:00pm
Cullimore Hall 611
New Jersey Institute of Technology

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Global change, community composition, and ecosystem functioning

Daniel Bunker

Columbia University

Global change poses a strong challenge to ecologists, environmental scientists, and conservation biologists: even as our natural and managed ecosystems become more stressed by the forces of global change, we require that these ecosystems produce both a greater quantity and a greater variety of ecosystem services. For instance, we may expect a forested ecosystem to produce timber, provide clean water, sequester carbon, support wildlife, and provide recreational opportunities, yet at the same time this forest community is being buffeted by climate change, invasive species, and land-use change. In order to ensure that our ecosystems provide the services society demands, we must be able to predict how ecological communities will respond to these global forces, and in turn predict how changes in community composition will affect ecosystem services. Because these processes transcend traditional ecological fields such as physiological, population, community and ecosystem ecology, our emerging predictive framework must incorporate theory and observation across these scales. Here I discuss several ongoing projects that contribute towards this goal.