Next Wednesday 27 February 2019 at 13:00h Dr. Anne Magurran - Centre for Biological Diversity, University of St Andrews, Scotland - will be giving the conference: "Biodiversity change" within the X Memorial Peregrí Casanova de Biodiversitat i Biologia Evolutiva.
The act will take place at the Sala Charles Darwin, Burjassot-València Campus, Universitat de València.
SEMINAR(i): Biodiversity change
WHO?: Dr. Anne Magurran - Centre for Biological Diversity, University of St Andrews, Scotland
WHAT?: Biodiversity change
WHEN?: Wednesday 27/02/2019 – 13:00 h
WHERE?: Sala Charles Darwin (Aulari Farmàcia)
ABSTRACT:
Human population growth, combined with economic development, is placing unprecedented pressures on world’s ecosystems. This has led to grave concern about the fate of global biodiversity, and its ability to sustain the ecosystem services on which we all depend.
As Charles Darwin first pointed out, ecological communities are not static, but instead undergo continual rearrangements of species identity and abundances. Until recently there have been relatively few attempts to quantify how natural systems are changing through time, and to what extent the changes we are seeing in the contemporary world exceed the baseline reorganization that Darwin noted.
In this talk I will argue that temporal β diversity (temporal turnover in species composition) remains an underappreciated aspect of biodiversity change. I will draw on recent work, including the BioTIME database (biotime.st-andrews.ac.uk) and targeted sampling of freshwater assemblages on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, to examine biodiversity change in the two dimensions of community structure - temporal α diversity and temporal β diversity. These analyses reveal interesting and sometimes unexpected patterns, and I will emphasise the important challenge of understanding the causes and consequences of biodiversity change.
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