DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Quantifying the Strength of Spatial Coexistence Mechanisms in Experimental Metacommunities

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Understanding the ecological processes that promote biological diversity and allow multiple species to coexist is fundamental for conservation and management. Understanding how the abiotic environment, such as light or nutrient levels, changes from place to place and how individuals of multiple species are clustered is often overlooked, but is critically important. This research will develop a method to directly measure how structure in the abiotic environment and in the clustering of individuals promotes coexistence between species. The scientific workforce will be strengthened through support for the education and training of a doctoral student and undergraduate students in theoretical and experimental ecology, and a high school teaching module will be developed to expose students to biological diversity experiments in ecology.The role of landscape structure in promoting diversity will be examined by combining a laboratory experimental system of freshwater microorganisms with mathematical models. Two hypotheses will be tested: (1) clustering of individuals will be the dominant mechanism leading to coexistence, and (2) stochasticity will reduce the strength of coexistence by weakening the effect of clustering. Diversity outcomes will be examined for multispecies communities of aquatic microorganisms in replicated laboratory experiments, where spatial structure, species abundance, dispersal, and abiotic conditions will be systematically manipulated. Mathematical models tailored to the experimental system will be developed to indirectly quantify and compare the contributions of different mechanisms of coexistence. The performance of the indirect method, which is commonly used for quantifying coexistence, will be assessed against the new experimental method developed. The proposed work will lead to a deeper understanding of how spatial structure promotes biodiversity.