The Environmental & Plant Biology Colloquium series presents Dr. Noelle G. Beckman on “Scaling from seedscape to ecosystems: the influence of vertebrates, insects, and pathogens on plant recruitment” on Friday, Jan. 23, at 11:50 a.m. in Porter Hall 104.
Beckham is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Ohio State University’s Mathematical Biosciences Institute.
Abstract: Mitigating the impacts of global change on ecosystems requires a mechanistic understanding of the processes underlying patterns of biodiversity. Her research investigates interactions between plants and their environment and examines the role of these interactions in limiting plant populations and maintaining biodiversity. She will discuss the influence of vertebrates, insects, and pathogens in the sequential stages of early plant recruitment (i.e. from fruit developing in the crown to seedlings on the ground), which are hypothesized to contribute to the coexistence of plant species. With experiments conducted in the tree canopy of a Neotropical forest, she shows that variation in plant performance is partly explained by different groups of natural enemies attacking plants and variation in plant functional traits. Using spatially-explicit models, she shows that the spatial pattern of seed dispersal, differences in natural enemy life history, and tree abundance influence patterns of plant survivorship. Many of these interactions are disrupted by global change, and she will discuss the consequences of these disruptions for plant communities and ecosystem functions.
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