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

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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. ***