Date of Award:

5-2013

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department:

Biology

Department name when degree awarded

Biology and the Ecology Center

Committee Chair(s)

S. K. Morgan Ernest

Committee

S. K. Morgan Ernest

Committee

Peter B. Adler

Committee

David N. Koons

Committee

Michael E. Pfrender

Committee

Ethan P. White

Abstract

Biodiversity research includes the study of where species occur, the commonness and rarity of species, the number of species, and the diversity of life-history traits that occur in a single location, or community. Research is increasingly recognizing that a combination of local and regional scale processes influence community dynamics over ecological and evolutionary time-scales. However, ecologists currently lack a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms driving biodiversity in different systems and at different spatial scales. This presents a critical problem because without understanding the important mechanisms that determine and maintain biodiversity, it is difficult to accurately predict community response to environmental change. This dissertation investigates the role that species traits and system-level properties have in determining biodiversity at local sites and evaluates biodiversity response to change.

Our results suggest that species traits are related to local vs. regional survival strategies and that partitioning communities into the two groups utilizing each strategy (core and transient, respectively) may help ecologists better understand and predict the impacts of environmental change on species composition and species richness. Our work also suggests that system-level properties (species richness and total abundance) are the main determinants of macroecological diversity patterns and that patterns are generally insensitive to environmental change. These findings suggest that species richness and macroecological diversity patterns should not be used as indicators for fundamental shifts within a system and imply that regional processes may be largely responsible for maintaining system-level properties.

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