Concordia University
Ph.D. candidate
Supervisor: Jean-Philippe Lessard
Start: 2018-09-01
End: 2024-04-30
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Project

The functional ecology of multispecies interactions
Functional traits are key to revealing the environmental determinants of biodiversity organization across trophic levels. However, trait-based approaches in ecology investigating mechanisms of biodiversity change along gradients often focus on assemblages of a single trophic level (e.g. plants). Networks (typically with species as vertices and interactions as edges) capture well the complexity of multitrophic assemblages. The structure of networks is strongly associated with ecosystem stability, and emergent patterns in the structural diversity of networks have been recently linked to differences in ecological assembly processes. Although networks are widely used by ecologists to quantify structural changes in biodiversity along gradients, trait-based concepts of ecological assembly are not yet fully integrated into research examining the ecological drivers of network structural changes. In this project, I develop quantitative syntheses of trait-based assembly processes influencing the structure of ecological networks.

Keywords

Biodiversité/Biodiversity, biotic interactions, community assembly, multitrophic ecology, functional macroecology, Ecological Networks

Publications

1- A synthesis of animal-mediated seed dispersal of palms reveals distinct biogeographical differences in species interactions
Muñoz, Gabriel, Kristian Trøjelsgaard, W. Daniel Kissling
2019 Journal of Biogeography