Mini-symposium 4

Understanding the eco-evolutionary assembly of species-rich communities: The role of stochastic community models

The assembly of ecological communities is influenced by on-going speciation, stochastic drift, never-ending disperal, and a wide range of selection processes (Vellend, 2010). What do we need to disentangle the relative role of all these processes? For the last years, mathematical/simulation models for community assembly has become an important tool to assess the contribution of different driving mechanisms to the eco-evolutionary assembly of species-rich communities in a variety of spatio-temporal scales.

A succesfull assessment of competing mechanisms requires a remarkable blend of model mathematical analysis, computer simulations, and empirical data confrontation. These three complementary research areas have experienced a great deal of cross-fertilization when adressing key questions in biodiversity research such as the role of competition and facilitation for species coexistence, the structure of ecological networks, the effect of climate change on species spatial distribution range shifts, and the impact of speciation and biogeography history on current community-level aggegrated patterns.

Stochastic communitiy models of different levels of complexity have become a predominant tool to address all these questions. For the last years, particularly since the publication of Hubbell's monograph on the neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography, we have seen a lot of progress, on the one hand, on the mathematical analysis of these models, and, on the other, on the development of statistical techniques to confront even quite complicated individual-based simulations to empirical data, such as approximate bayesian computation (ABC).

The main goal of our mini-symposium is to gather scientists together to discuss cutting-edge research at the center of the magical triangle between model mathematical analysis, individual-based computer simulations, and data-based model comparision. We are looking forward to seeing new inspirational insights into community assembly and species-coexistence in species-rich communities as a result of this mini-symposium.

Invited speakers

Carlos Melian: Eco-evolutionary diversification dynamics.

James L. Rosindell: Unifying Ecology and Macroevolution with Individual-Based Theory.

Organisers

José Capitan (CEAB, CISC, Spain) and D. Alonso (CEAB, CISC, Spain).