Tuesday, August 8, 2017: 8:00 AM-11:30 AM
Portland Blrm 253, Oregon Convention Center
Organizer:
Laura Pollock, CNRS
Co-organizers:
Matthew V. Talluto, CNRS; and
Karel Mokany, CSIRO
Moderator:
Wilfried Thuiller, CNRS
Global change and human activities are causing massive impacts to biodiversity in nearly every ecosystem. Accurate biodiversity projections are essential to help address this conservation crisis, which has driven the recent diversification of approaches to modeling biodiversity. This symposium will present a range of cutting-edge methods for modeling biodiversity, with a focus on bridging the gap between models focused on species (e.g., species distribution models, population models) and those focused on directly modeling aggregate measures of biodiversity (e.g., alpha- and beta-diversity models). Single-species models can produce extremely accurate results, yet it can be difficult to aggregate these models to account for broader diversity patterns without considering (at a minimum) species interactions. Recent advances in modeling multiple species simultaneously begins to address this problem, but comes with its own limitations and caveats. Directly modeling aggregate properties of diversity is appealing, however much information is lost by not considering information for individual species. Thus, the challenge moving forward will be to develop approaches that combine information from the population and species level with aggregate properties of diversity at the community level. The speakers for this symposium will present various aspects of this problem, ending with a general synthesis and discussion about approaches and challenges in further advancing biodiversity modeling.
9:00 AM
Predicting species range dynamics: Strengths and weaknesses of simple to complex models
Damaris Zurell, Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL;
Wilfried Thuiller, Université Grenoble Alpes;
Jörn Pagel, University of Hohenheim;
Juliano S. Cabral, University of Würzburg;
Tamara Muenkemueller, Université Grenoble Alpes;
Dominique Gravel, University of Sherbrooke;
Stefan Dullinger, University of Vienna;
Signe Normand, University of Aarhus;
Katja H. Schiffers, Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre;
Kara A. Moore, UC Davis;
Niklaus E. Zimmermann, Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL