Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The central goal of community ecology is to explain the substantial degree to which natural communities vary in composition. Plant communities, for example, vary in the number of species they host, how community resources are divided among resident species, and in the morphology of constituent species. While considerable effort has gone into understanding the mechanisms that drive this variation, many questions are still unresolved, and many competing theories are still vigorously debated. For example, it is clear that competition plays an important role in plant communities; however, current models of competition suggest that competition will result in the exclusion of all but the most competitive species. Given that virtually all natural communities contain more than one species, it stands to reason that either the impact of competition is mitigated by other processes that promote diversity, such as dispersal, or that the competitive process is more complicated than we know, and tends not to result in the loss of all but the most competitive species. My students and I will examine these possibilities by developing more realistic models of multi-species competition, testing these models with manipulative field experiments, and by using null modeling techniques to identify and quantify the impacts of competition, dispersal, and herbivory in natural communities spanning important environmental gradients. This work will contribute to the growing body of literature concerning how these important mechanisms interact to shape natural communities. Additionally, understanding the relative impact of different mechanisms that may augment (e.g., dispersal), or reduce diversity (e.g., competition) will greatly inform conservation and restoration initiatives, and aid in the management of invasive species.