Prof. Annette Ostling, Department of Integrative Biology and Oden Institute, UT Austin

"Competitive coexistence and emergent patterns in ecological communities"

Abstract: Ecological theory posits that the reason we see surprisingly high diversity in nature, like the hundreds to thousands of competing tree species coexisting in a tropical forest, is that they actually have important “niche differences” lessening their competition. A key alternative is competing species instead coexist due to their similarity in ability, in which case immigration and other chance events importantly shape the community. In the Ostling lab we develop and test theory of these two modes of community assembly and their combination, where both differences and chance events are important. We are especially interested in emergent patterns that can give us insight into the mechanisms at play, as controlled experiments are difficult when organisms live longer than researchers. We also study other ideas regarding coexistence involving more complex interaction structures like intransitive loops. In this talk I will give a an introduction to these ideas and our work, emphasizing our interest in emergent trait clusters suggestive of niche differences, and in the variation in life history between species that can enable successional niche differences.