about.md

layout	title
page	About messDiv

We will be hosting several working groups at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv).

A central challenge in understanding the origins of biodiversity is that, while ecological phenomena occur across observably short time periods, the longer-term drivers and outcomes of these ecological processes can often only be indirectly infered. We propose to develop inferential models at the interface between macroecology, macroevolution and population-level processes, and apply them to data from geological or ecological chronosequences that present communities of different ages. Inferences from these snapshots in time thereby allow for model validation and a link between direct observational methods for local communities and models that make indirect inferences underlying community history using genetic and phylogenetic patterns. The workshop will use data from multiple insular systems, each comprising replicated sites that range from $<$ 500 years to $>$ 5 million years. We propose to directly link ecological theories and models of community composition and comparative population genomics, all within a temporal framework. Our approach is to build a unified model bridging theory from phylogenetic and comparative population genomics with ecological theory, so as to understand the history underlying patterns of species diversity. This model will then be used to make joint predictions of species abundances and genetic diversities over time. We will then test this model with data collected across diverse taxa and a range of systems that provide snapshots in time. This unified approach will bridge ecological and evolutionary theory to elucidate processes responsible for origins and maintenance of species diversity and provide a framework for making predictions about biodiversity dynamics.

You can read about the preliminary mechanics of this model here.

This is of course based on a large existing literature which we summarize here.

Participants

Name	Institution	Email
Rosemary Gillespie	UC Berkeley	gillespie@berkeley.edu
Mike Hickerson	CUNY (New York)	mhickerson@gmail.com
Andrew Rominger	Santa Fe Institute	ajrominger@gmail.com
Jonathan Chase	iDiv, Leipzig	jonathan.chase@idiv.de
Luke Harmon	University of Idaho	lukeh@uidaho.edu
Isaac Overcast	CUNY (New York)	isaac.overcast@gmail.com
Katie Wagner	Univ Wyoming	catherine.wagner@uwyo.edu
James Rosindell	Imperial	j.rosindell@imperial.ac.uk
Rampal Etienne	Univ. Groningen	r.s.etienne@rug.nl
Tiffany Knight	iDiv, Leipzig	tiffany.knight@idiv.de
Luke Mahler	Univ. Toronto	luke.mahler@utoronto.ca
Brian McGill	University of Maine	mail@brianmcgill.org
Christine Parent	University of Idaho	ceparent@uidaho.edu
Francois Massol	University of Lille	francois.massol@univ-lille1.fr
Jairo Patiño	UC Berkeley	jpatino.llorente@gmail.com
Paulo Borges	Univer. dos Açores	paulo.av.borges@uac.pt
Angela McGaughran	Australia National University	ang.mcgaughran@gmail.com
Joaquin Hortal	Mus Nac Cien Nat (CSIC), Madrid	jhortal@mncn.csic.es
Petr Keil	iDiv, Leipzig	pkeil@seznam.cz
Ben Peter	Max Planck, Leipzig	benj.pet@gmail.com
Megan Ruffey	University of Idaho	ruff6699@vandals.uidaho.edu
Bob Week	University of Idaho	bobweek@gmail.com