McGill University
Ph.D. candidate
Supervisor: Frederic Guichard
Steph Weber, McGill University
Start: 2019-09-01

Project

Consequences of metabolic plasticity on community structure
Resource competition theory has overlooked the feedbacks that emerge from organisms shaping their environment through resource consumption, which in turn, shape plastic changes in traits in direct response to environmental variation. Community ecology has yet to integrate this feedback to predictions of community structure that include functional diversity and relative abundance distributions. I study how plasticity in resource consumption traits, defined by individual energy allocation constraints, shape community structure. I use classic consumer-resource models where consumption strategies are dynamic by optimizing organism growth, underpinned by investment constraints in physiological machinery for acquisition of resources. Additionally, I work with in the lab with E. coli to understand plasticity in resource consumption strategies and its ecological consequences under a well-defined environment.