|
Past Research 1996-2002 Summary: All studies are linked by the common goal of understanding the causes and consequences of disturbance and environmental heterogeneity for the population and community ecology of animals and plants in both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. The re-emergence of metapopulation dynamics, the development of spatially-explicit population models, and the importance of spatial distributions for conservation ecology are key issues in the ecological literature. At the regional scale (II.A and II.B), we focus on how human land use affects diversity of terrestrial and aquatic communities and to develop predictive models of potential future changes. These studies incorporate spatial variation in factors as diverse as soil moisture, foliage chemistry, forest community composition, and stream substratum disturbance. They further measure the responses to disturbance and environmental heterogeneity in organisms as diverse as small mammals, fish, birds, insect herbivores, oribatid mites, vegetation, and stream invertebrates. There are fundamental questions in common to all of these projects, and together they address the overall importance of a spatially-complex environment for the population and community ecology of species in general, within the overriding theme of natural and anthropogenic disturbance. To learn more: P-IIB. Land-use and long-term change in aquatic ecosystems of the southern Appalachians P-IIC. Linkages among spatial variation in plant quality, herbivore population dynamics, and soil processes P-IID. Environmental heterogeneity and community dynamics Previous (Initiative I) | Next (Initiative III) |