U.S.-Norway Cooperative Research to Integrate Mathematical and Simulation Models of Populations and Landscape Mosaics

9400073 Wiens该奖项支持教授约翰·威恩斯和比阿特丽斯·货车霍恩，连同博士后助理托马斯克里斯特，所有的科罗拉多州立大学，在生态研究合作与尼尔斯Stenseth和他的小组在生物学系的奥斯陆，挪威大学。 他们试图了解景观马赛克结构与个体生态的关系，并将这些影响转化为种群和社区水平。 科罗拉多州立大学在模拟建模方面具有优势，而奥斯陆大学则强调分析和数学模型。 他们将整合这些方法来解决环境异质性如何影响生态系统以及这些影响如何随空间尺度而变化的常见问题。 关于生态系统的尺度效应和明显的空间异质性的问题已经成为当代生态学的核心。 这项合作将评估这些问题的两种方法，将它们联合应用于从两个小组正在研究的不同系统独立收集的经验数据。 其结果应该是对预测理论的贡献，这将在保护生物多样性和受威胁的生态系统方面有重要的应用。 ***

9400073 Wiens This award supports Professors John Wiens and Beatrice Van Horne, together with postdoctoral associate Thomas Crist, all of Colorado State University, to collaborate in ecological research with Nils Stenseth and his group in the Department of Biology of the University of Oslo, Norway. They are attempting to understand the relationship of the mosaic structure of landscapes to the ecology of individuals, and to translate these effects to the population and community levels. The Colorado State group has strengths in simulation modeling while the Oslo group emphasizes analytical, mathematical models. They will integrate these approaches to address common questions about how environmental heterogeneity affects ecological systems and about how these effects vary with spatial scale. Questions about the effects of scale and of explicit spatial heterogeneity on ecological systems have become a centerpiece of contemporary ecology. This collaboration will evaluate two methodological approaches to these questions by applying them jointly to independently gathered empirical data from the different systems being studied by the two groups. The result should be a contribution to predictive theory that will have significant applications in preserving biodiversity and threatened ecosystems. ***