Workshop on community phylogenetics

The Canada Research Chair in Spatial Modelling and Biodiversity and the Quebec Centre for Biodiversity Science (QCBS) are co-hosting a workshop on Community Phylogenetics between 11 – 14 October 2011 at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). The event will gather many leading research experts in this area to provide a synthesis and discuss new approaches for integrating traits and phylogenetic trees in community ecology.

Format

The first day of the workshop (11 October, 9:00 to 16:00) is open to all student and researcher members of the QCBS and will comprise a series of short presentations by the invited speakers. Attendees will have the opportunity to meet with the invited speakers and to discuss their research. An open floor discussion will be held at the end of the day. This is a particularly valuable opportunity for graduate students interested in community ecology.

The following days (12-14 October) will consist of breakout groups working on three major themes, detailed below. The goal of these groups is to discuss and propose new research findings and directions in community ecology. Participation in these discussion groups is under invitation only and interested parties should contact the organizers directly.

Background

Local communities consist of species that are a subset of the species found within the regional species pools or biota in which they occur. In most cases, local communities vary in composition and local subsets can be very different even in sites that are close together. A key question is what factors determine which subsets co-exist in which sites and how can we study, quantify, and interpret these patterns? The concept of community assembly seeks to identify the rules that determine how large regional species pools are filtered into local communities. To date, approaches have been largely piecemeal. The goal of this workshop is to propose a more integrated framework for linking variation among species (trait and/or phylogenies) to the attributes of sites (such as local environment and spatial heterogeneity) that would address the roles and interactions between local and regional forces in selecting which (and what types of) species co-exist in local communities within a broader metacommunity.

Major themes

We envision three major themes:

linking spatial and environmental variation to traits and phylogenetic community patterns;
linking comparative biology, traits and community phylogenetics; and
the balance between micro and macro evolutionary processes and how intra and interspecific trait variation mediate species co-existence.

Our hope is that combined, these themes will provide the necessary components to promote advancement in community ecology.