BES Annual Meeting 8-10th Sept 2009 Thematic Topic:
Life History and Functional Trait Variation in Tropical Systems
The biogeographic variation of life has predominantly been studied using taxonomy, but this focus is changing. There is a resurging interest in understanding patterns in the distribution not only of taxa but also of the traits those taxa possess: Species vary widely in their life history strategies both within and among sites. While variation in some traits is correlated among species, there are several largely independent axes of variation. For example, in plants these include seed size, leaf size, mature height, and wood density. Patterns of trait variation shed light on fundamental questions in biology, including why organisms live where they do and how they will respond to environmental change: at the population level, it explains interspecific variation in demography, population structure, and dynamics; at the community level, it can contribute to niche partitioning and thus coexistence; and at the ecosystem level, the distribution of traits within a community affects virtually every whole-system metric including standing biomass and carbon fluxes. Although the subject has received much attention from plant ecologists, the amount of data available has increased, allowing much more rigorous analyses and whole communities to be compared. We also aim to attract animal and marine ecologists and encourage dialogue across the taxonomic divide.
Keynote: Ian Wright, Macquarie University, Australia
Ian's work focuses on quantifying how key plant traits vary with each other and with environmental factors, both in Australia and world-wide. He will give an overview of current work and future directions in ecological trait/strategy research, which will be of interest to both tropical & non-tropical ecologists.
Invited presentations
Jan Beck, University of Basel. Understanding patterns of abundance and distribution in tropical Lepdioptera
David Burslem & Emily Swaine, Unversity of Aberdeen. Functional trait diversity in the Dipterocarpaceae