2017 ESA Annual Meeting (August 6 -- 11)

SYMP 6 - New Approaches and Challenges for the Next Generation of Biodiversity Models

Tuesday, August 8, 2017: 8:00 AM-11:30 AM
Portland Blrm 253, Oregon Convention Center
Organizer:
Laura Pollock
Co-organizers:
Matthew V. Talluto and Karel Mokany
Moderator:
Wilfried Thuiller
Global change and human activities are causing massive impacts to biodiversity in nearly every ecosystem. Accurate biodiversity projections are essential to help address this conservation crisis, which has driven the recent diversification of approaches to modeling biodiversity. This symposium will present a range of cutting-edge methods for modeling biodiversity, with a focus on bridging the gap between models focused on species (e.g., species distribution models, population models) and those focused on directly modeling aggregate measures of biodiversity (e.g., alpha- and beta-diversity models). Single-species models can produce extremely accurate results, yet it can be difficult to aggregate these models to account for broader diversity patterns without considering (at a minimum) species interactions. Recent advances in modeling multiple species simultaneously begins to address this problem, but comes with its own limitations and caveats. Directly modeling aggregate properties of diversity is appealing, however much information is lost by not considering information for individual species. Thus, the challenge moving forward will be to develop approaches that combine information from the population and species level with aggregate properties of diversity at the community level. The speakers for this symposium will present various aspects of this problem, ending with a general synthesis and discussion about approaches and challenges in further advancing biodiversity modeling.
8:00 AM
Maximising value from presence-only biological data: Modelling community-level patterns with species observations
Andrew J. Hoskins, CSIRO; Thomas D. Harwood, CSIRO; Chris Ware, CSIRO; Kristen Williams, CSIRO; Simon Ferrier, CSIRO
8:30 AM
Modelling species interactions from multivariate abundance data with Gaussian copulas
Gordana Popovic, University of New South Wales; David Warton, UNSW; Francis K.C. Hui, Australian National University
9:00 AM
Predicting species range dynamics: Strengths and weaknesses of simple to complex models
Damaris Zurell, Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL; Wilfried Thuiller, Université Grenoble Alpes; Jörn Pagel, University of Hohenheim; Juliano S. Cabral, University of Würzburg; Tamara Muenkemueller, Université Grenoble Alpes; Dominique Gravel, University of Sherbrooke; Stefan Dullinger, University of Vienna; Signe Normand, University of Aarhus; Katja H. Schiffers, Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre; Kara A. Moore, UC Davis; Niklaus E. Zimmermann, Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL
9:30 AM
10:10 AM
Accounting for imperfect detection of species in the estimates of different biodiversity facets
Marta A. Jarzyna, Yale University; Walter Jetz, Yale University
10:40 AM
Combining information from communities and species to improve our understanding of biodiversity patterns and dynamics
Karel Mokany, CSIRO; Thomas D. Harwood, CSIRO; Alex Bush, CSIRO; Simon Ferrier, CSIRO
11:10 AM
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