OOS 12

Snapshot Ecology: Inferring Ecosystem Dynamics from a Single Point in Time or Space

Understanding ecosystem dynamics, such as transitions between ecosystem states, often requires long time series, or observations over large spatial scales. The availability of this data rapidly becomes a limiting factor for ecologists as time-lengths get longer and/or the areas more remote. We aim to present a variety of approaches that can circumvent this problem, through the inference of ecological transitions through single snapshots in time. “Snapshot data” refers to a (set of) measurement(s) at one particular moment in time. The presented approaches have in common that temporal dynamics are inferred from data that is temporally limited by means of theoretical model frameworks that enable extrapolation to ecologically relevant time frames. Through this synergy between model development and empirical data collection, snapshot ecology provides a means to infer complex ecosystem behavior from limited measurements. With both computational power and the availability of “snapshot data” (e.g. Google Earth) rapidly increasing, there is considerable potential for future application of the approaches presented in this session.