OOS 54
The Role of Biotic Interactions in Structuring Species Distributions: Synthesizing Across Ecological Disciplines and Spatial Scales in the Face of Climate Change

Wednesday, August 12, 2015: 1:30 PM-5:00 PM
336, Baltimore Convention Center
Organizer:
Lindsey L. Thurman
Co-organizer:
Allison K. Barner
Moderator:
Allison K. Barner
Over the last century, ecologists have faced the challenge of understanding the dynamic processes that structure species distributions. Different subfields of ecology have contributed substantially to this task, working at the scale of local communities to entire biogeographic regions. Despite studying relevant and interrelated processes, ecologists struggle to integrate this knowledge across disparate spatial scales and ecological disciplines. In the next 100 years, this synthesis becomes even more urgent given the urgent need to forecast the effects of global climate change on ecological systems. Currently, attempts to tackle this issue rely on a suite of niche models that correlate species’ environmental requirements with their large-scale geographic distributions (e.g. species distribution models, bioclimatic envelope models, habitat suitability models, etc.). However, these correlative models ignore important ecological knowledge about species interactions gained over decades of experiments and observational studies, the results of which show that biotic interactions can structure species distributions and contribute to species coexistence. This problematic deficiency has been noted and widely debated for the past decade. We argue that the discussion should shift from whether or not biotic interactions are relevant to species distributions, to at what scale do these patterns manifest and how do we integrate our understanding of processes acting at different spatial scales. The fundamental challenge to addressing the role of biotic interactions is that it requires bridging theoretical, process-based models of species interaction networks with spatially explicit, correlative models of species geographic distributions. Further, available information to build these models ranges from individual-based, biophysical effects of climate change, to global occurrence records. Thus, bridging the gap between these disciplines requires a synthesis of current methods, a conceptualization of how these methods can be integrated, and a discussion about emerging methods. We have invited speakers from a diversity of ecological disciplines to spark a discussion about the role of species interactions in species distributions from both a conceptual and applied perspective. We specifically ask speakers to address what they think are the most pressing challenges to incorporating biotic interactions into predictive species distribution models and to improving the accuracy of predictions about the effects of climate change on ecological communities.
1:50 PM
Forecasting the forest and the trees: Consequences of competition and climate for biodiversity change
James Clark, Duke University; Brian Beckage, The University of Vermont; Aaron Berdanier, Duke University; Michael Dietze, Boston University; Christopher Gough, Virginia Commonwealth University; Brady Hardiman, Boston University; Matthew Kwit, Duke University; Jacqueline Mohan, University of Georgia; Scott M. Pearson, Mars Hill University; William J. Platt, Louisiana State University; Amanda Schwantes, Duke University; Bijan Seyednasrollah, Duke University; Bradley J. Tomasek, Duke University; Christopher W. Woodall, USDA Forest Service; Peter H. Wyckoff, University of Minnesota, Morris; Kai Zhu, Carnegie Institution for Science
2:10 PM
Coexistence theory provides the key to integrating species interactions into predictions of species’ range limits
William Godsoe, University of Canterbury; Frederick Adler, University of Utah; Miguel Araújo, Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales; Guillaume Blanchet, University of Helsinki; Michael Bode, University of Melbourne; Lauren Buckley, University of Washington; G. Chris Cosner, University of Miami; Janet Franklin, Arizona State University; Nathaniel J. Holland, University of Houston; Henriette (Yetta) Jager, Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Jill E. Jankowski, University of British Columbia; Bruce Kendall, University of California Santa Barbara; Anthony W. King, Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Otso Ovaskainen, University of Helsinki; Robin Snyder, Case Western Reserve University; Robert Holt, University of Florida; Dominique Gravel, Université du Québec à Rimouski
2:50 PM
Competitive interactions between tree species will slow compositional turnover with climate change
Janneke Hille Ris Lambers, University of Washington; Ian K. Breckheimer, University of Washington; Bijan Seyednasrollah, Duke University; James Clark, Duke University; Jerry F. Franklin, University of Washington; Andrew J. Larson, University of Montana; James A. Freund, University of Washington
3:10 PM
3:20 PM
Community-level model performance across large temporal scales and periods of climatic novelty
Kaitlin Clare Maguire, University of California Merced; Diego Nieto-Lugilde, Appalachian Lab. University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science; Jessica L. Blois, University of California - Merced; Matthew C. Fitzpatrick, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science; Jack W. Williams, University of Wisconsin-Madison
3:40 PM
Scale-dependence of biotic interactions: Empirical evidence and implications during climate change
Phoebe Zarnetske, Michigan State University; Jonathan Belmaker, Tel Aviv University; Sydne Record, Bryn Mawr College; Mao-Ning Tuanmu, Yale University; Angela L. Strecker, Portland State University; Lydia Beaudrot, Conservation International; Sara Zonneveld, University of Exeter
4:00 PM
Incorporating known competitive and facilitiative interactions into SDMs for plant species: Evaluating patterns across spatial scales
Jennifer E. Weaver, UC Berkeley; George K. Roderick, UC Berkeley; Emily C. Farrer, UC Berkeley; Kimberly J. La Pierre, UC Berkeley; Yan Sun, UC Berkeley; Sean P. Maher, Missouri State University; Stephanie Porter, Washington State University, Vancouver; Gio Rapacciuolo, UC Berkeley; Erica N. Spotswood, UC Berkeley; Blair C. McLaughlin, Hampshire College; Adam Zeilinger, UC Berkeley
4:20 PM
Will biotic interactions determine temperate tree range expansion success?
Daniel W. Katz, University of Michigan; Inés Ibáñez, University of Michigan