U.S.-Venezuela Cooperative Research on Experimental and Evolutionary Demography: An Approach to the Ecology of Tropical Savanna Communities

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This U.S.-Venezuela award will support Professor Hal Caswell of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in a research collaboration with Professor Juan Silva of the Universidad de los Andes in Merida, Venezuela. The investigators intend to study the way in which the environment, genetics, development, and life history interact to produce a set of vital rates (i.e., rates of survival, reproduction, growth, etc.). By incorporating those rates into appropriate structured population models, mathematical analysis may be used to predict patterns of population dynamics and the sensitivity of those patterns to changes in the environment. The researchers plan to collaborate by combining theoretical population models with an experimental program on tropical savanna plant populations. The theoretical research will extend statistical tools for analyzing demographic experiments, develop matrix models for interacting populations, and incorporate quantitative genetics into models of complex life histories. The experimental research will address the comparative responses of annual and perennial savanna plants to environmental disturbance, competitive interactions among savanna grasses, the evolution of seed dormancy, and the way these factors combine to determine savanna community structure. This approach to population dynamics is a most powerful approach to understanding community patterns, including diversity, stability, and coexistence.