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Our keynote speaker is a Curators' Professor of
Biology at the Department
of Biology, University of Missouri
at St. Louis. His interests focus on diversity in ecological
systems at several levels of organization and scales of time and
space. A long-standing interest is the evolutionary diversification
of avian life-histories, emphasizing comparative and theoretical
analyses of variation in life tables, including patterns of senescence,
and physiological and experimental studies of growth, development,
and parental care.
On a higher level of ecological organization, he focuses on the
historical development of ecological communities and regional species
richness, using comparative analyses of diversity patterns and molecular
analyses of genetic divergence and phylogenetic relationships. |
Keynote Address:
Historical and Geographic Perspectives
on Ecological Communities
Abstract:
Species richness varies widely over the surface
of the Earth. Ecologists traditionally have regarded this variation
as reflecting the direct influence of the physical environment on
the number of species that can coexist in local ecological communities.
This idea is supported by the generally strong correlation between
species richness and environmental variables. Alternatively, patterns
of species richness might arise through species production and adaptive
radiation within a region, which would associate high species richness
with historically widespread environments, also producing a diversity-environment
correlation. I shall outline various approaches to partitioning
variation in species richness between local and regional factors
and show how phylogenetic analyses can be used to explore the history
of diversification within regions. These analyses support a strong
imprint of history and evolution on contemporary patterns of species
richness, balancing the constraining influence of species interactions
within communities.
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