Thursday, August 9, 2018
243, New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center
In this Inspire talk, I’m going to address how we can use traits to scale processes from individual fungi to ecosystems. Fungi have widely different traits. Even regarding body size, individuals can range from microscopic to as large as a blue whale. They are all heterotrophs, but they use different strategies to acquire their energy. Some can break down tough material that is inaccessible to any other organism. Others mostly live on simple sugars. I will describe how trait-based models can improve predictions of ecosystem function by accounting for this high diversity of fungal traits.