IGN 14-1
The era of big ecology: The COMPADRE Plant Matrix Database
The era of big ecology: The COMPADRE Plant Matrix Database
Thursday, August 14, 2014
313, Sacramento Convention Center
“To say that humanity has been slow to explore the home planet is an understatement” (E.O. Wilson). Fortunately, the last decade has witnessed the emergence of worldwide databases (e.g. GenBank, TRY, BIEN, D3) that allow us to tackle broad ecological questions. We introduce the COMPADRE Plant Matrix Database, which contains demographic, biogeographic, and phylogenetic information for ca. 1,000 plant species worldwide. We review some recent findings using COMPADRE, on-going lines of research exploring plant demography in a biogeographic context, and pinpoint promising research questions that can now be answered thanks to the >15,000 matrix population models digitized in COMPADRE.