International Research Fellow Award: Theoretical approaches to understanding the structure of ecological communities

0076200国际研究员奖励计划使美国科学家和工程师在国外进行三到二十四个月的研究。 该计划的奖项提供了联合研究的机会，以及使用国外独特或互补的设施，专业知识和实验条件。该奖项将为Christopher Klausmeier博士提供12个月的支持，与位于瑞士Kastanienbaum的EAWAG/ETH湖沼研究中心的Peter Bossard和Elena Litchman博士，巴塞尔大学的Tadeusz Kawecki博士，和奥地利维也纳国际应用系统分析研究所的Ulf Dieckmann博士。 他的研究主题是理解生态群落结构的理论方法。该项目的目标是开发灵活的理论技术，使群落结构能够从一系列潜在的相互作用物种中自我组织。 这些方法是由IIASA的Dieckmann博士的小组率先用于进化研究的。 Klausmeier博士将与EAWAG的合作者一起将这些技术应用于一种特殊生态系统的机械模型：湖泊浮游生物群落。 他将确定群落结构如何取决于环境参数，如营养负荷，然后根据一系列湖泊的数据测试这些预测。 他希望开发新的通用数学技术来研究社区集会。 通过将它们应用于湖泊浮游生物群落，他希望扩大对这些群落结构如何取决于环境参数以及它们将如何应对人类影响的理解。

0076200The International Research Fellow Awards Program enablesU.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-fourmonths of research abroad. The program's awards provideopportunities for joint research, and the use of unique orcomplementary facilities, expertise and experimentalconditions abroad.This award will provide Dr. Christopher Klausmeier with support for 12 months to work with Drs. Peter Bossard and Elena Litchman at EAWAG/ETH Limnological Research Centre in Kastanienbaum, Switzerland, Dr. Tadeusz Kawecki at the University of Basel, and Dr. Ulf Dieckmann at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna, Austria. The topic of his research is the theoretical approach to understanding the structure of ecological communities.The goal of this project is to develop flexible theoretical techniques which would allow community structure to self-organize from a range of potentially interacting species. These approaches have been pioneered by Dr. Dieckmann's group at IIASA for use in evolutionary studies. With collaborators at EAWAG, Dr. Klausmeier will apply these techniques to mechanistic models of a particular kind of ecological system: lake plankton communities. He will determine how community structure depends on environmental parameters such as nutrient loading, then test these predictions against data from a range of lakes. He expects to develop new general mathematical techniques for studying community assembly. By applying them to lake plankton communities, he hopes to expand understanding of how the structure of these communities depends on environmental parameters and how they will respond to human impacts.