OOS 7 - Modeling At the Front Lines: Predicting Biodiversity Response to Disturbance and Change

Monday, August 6, 2012: 1:30 PM-5:00 PM
B110, Oregon Convention Center
Organizer:
Steven F. Railsback, Humboldt State University
Co-organizers:
Jarl Giske, University of Bergen; Uta Berger, Institute of Forest Growth and Computer Science, Dresden University of Technology; and Volker Grimm, UFZ, Helmholtz Centre for Ecological Research - UFZ
Moderator:
Steven F. Railsback, Humboldt State University
Everyone talks about biodiversity but doing something about it is not easy. This session is about what ecologists are doing to predict and understand how biodiversity resources respond to change induced by humans. Can we really utilize life on earth while being confident that we also preserve and sustain it? Biodiversity occurs at many levels, from variation among individuals (in behavior, personality, genetics) to species (e.g., in life history variation within and among populations) to communities and ecosystems. Modeling how biodiversity characteristics respond to disturbances from local habitat alteration to global change is a great challenge; traditional system-level models are often not useful because they do not represent either the system’s internal variation that makes up biodiversity or the lower-level processes through which disturbance affects individuals and hence populations and ecosystems. This session provides specific examples and synthesis of how important biodiversity problems are being modeled at various levels. Speakers will address questions such as (1) What are important biodiversity resources, how are they quantified, and how are they affected by human activity? (2) What kinds of models and modeling techniques are useful for predicting and understanding the response of these resources to disturbance, and for understanding how response to disturbance depends on biodiversity? (3) What have we learned so far from these models? The speakers work at a diversity of ecological levels, from individuals to ecosystems. The focus will be on studies and models of specific real systems and management problems, and problems such as: how diversity among individuals affect a population’s response to disturbance, how the response of community structure to habitat alteration emerges from life history differences among its species, how exotic species can alter population responses to disturbance, and how harvest and management methods affect community and ecosystem biodiversity. The session will begin with a historical overview, include an analysis of lessons from the extensive history of biodiversity modeling in forest ecology, and end with a synthesis of methods, successes, and challenges.
2:50 PM
 Modelling the impact of timing of land use on biodiversity conservation for the decision support software ‘Ecopay’
Karin Johst, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research—UFZ; Melanie Mewes, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ; Astrid Sturm, Freie Universität Berlin; Martin Drechsler, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research—UFZ; Frank Wätzold, Brandenburg Technical University
3:10 PM
3:20 PM
 Functional equivalence versus functional diversity: Is there a minimum dimensionality for characterizing forests to a reasonable level of realism?
Yue Lin, German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig; Uta Berger, Institute of Forest Growth and Computer Science, Dresden University of Technology; Volker Grimm, UFZ, Helmholtz Centre for Ecological Research - UFZ; Qianru Ji, Institute of Hydrobiology, Dresden University of Technology
3:40 PM
 Projections of climate change impacts on forest succession for local land management using a new vegetation model, CV-STM
Gabriel I. Yospin, Montana State University; Scott D. Bridgham, University of Oregon; Ronald P. Neilson, Oregon State University (Courtesy); John P. Bolte, Oregon State University; Dominique M. Bachelet, Conservation Biology Institute and Oregon State University; Peter J. Gould, USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station; Constance A. Harrington, USDA Forest Service; Jane A. Kertis, USDA Forest Service; James Merzenich, USDA Forest Service; Cody Evers, University of Oregon; Bart R. Johnson, University of Oregon
4:00 PM
 Human landscape disturbance outweighs local disturbance in predicting boreal biodiversity
Stephen J. Mayor, Memorial University of Newfoundland; James F. Cahill Jr., University of Alberta; Stan Boutin, University of Alberta; Fangliang He, Sun Yat-sen University
4:20 PM
 Habitats, dispersal, and multiple threats: Challenges for biodiversity under global change
Christian Hof, Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F) & Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung
4:40 PM
 Simple models of complex systems: The paradox of modeling biodiversity
Volker Grimm, UFZ, Helmholtz Centre for Ecological Research - UFZ
See more of: Organized Oral Session