Topic: community assembly

Design restoration projects using ecological principles and the Society for Ecological Restoration standards. Case studies connect limiting factors, community assembly and reference ecosystems with diagnoses of degradation, project objectives and intervention choices. Participants compare passive and active restoration, monitoring and adaptive management, ecological recovery indicators and public participation. Collaborative exercises culminate in proposing restoration of a degraded ecosystem and explaining its expected societal and ecological benefits. Live sessions: 26 and 29 October; 2, 5,

A major unresolved question in microbiome research is whether the complex ecological patterns observed in surveys of natural communities can be explained and predicted by fundamental, quantitative principles. Bridging theory and experiment is hampered by the multiplicity of ecological processes that simultaneously affect community assembly and a lack of theoretical tools for modeling diverse ecosystems. Here, I will present a simple ecological model of microbial communities that reproduces large-scale ecological patterns observed across multiple natural and experimental settings including comp