Robust methods for estimating conspecific negative density dependence

为了保护植物多样性，科学家必须首先了解个体和物种如何影响它们的邻居。驱动这些睦邻互动的过程有很多，它们以令人困惑的方式相互关联。该奖项将支持一系列研讨会，目的是帮助科学家了解维持植物多样性的一个特别重要的过程。当同一类型的植物长得太近时，它们中的许多会死于共同的疾病或激烈的竞争。这些死亡为不同类型的植物提供了迁移的机会，增强了多样性。简而言之，这个过程阻止了一个物种到处生长并接管一切。尽管这似乎是常识，但科学家们在如何衡量它以及它对多样性的真正意义上存在很大分歧。这个奖项将把许多这样的科学家聚集在一起，找出前进的道路。将邀请来自许多类型机构和职业阶段的科学家，包括主要来自本科院校、早期职业研究人员和代表性不足的群体的成员。所有参与者都将有机会为研讨会的成果做出贡献，这将对预测植物如何应对环境压力具有重要意义。这一系列的研讨会有两个主要目标。首先，组织者将召集顶尖的研究人员开发强大的方法，使用尖端的建模技术来评估植物之间的局部相互作用-特别是同种负密度依赖-是否有助于植物物种多样性。这些会议产生的方法可能会成为标准化的方法，为评价对维持植物物种多样性的生态影响提供一种急需的共同货币。其次，组织者将把这些新开发的方法应用于世界各地植物生存和生长的长期数据。这些分析将测试植物之间维持多样性的相互作用如何在气候梯度和不同植物物种之间作为其性状的功能而变化。对这些基本问题的综合研究是对植物之间的局部相互作用在确定区域和全球植物物种多样性格局中的重要性进行转化性见解和进一步实验研究的第一步。为了确保实现这些目标，多角度是必不可少的。因此，拟议的系列研讨会将积极吸引来自不同职业阶段和背景的参与者，包括在科学领域代表性不足的群体。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

To conserve plant diversity, scientists must first understand how individuals and species affect their neighbors. There are many processes that drive these neighborly interactions and they are related to each other in confusing ways. This award will support a series of workshops with the goal helping scientists understand one particularly important process that maintains plant diversity. When plants of the same type grow too close together, many of them die from shared disease or intense competition. Those deaths create opportunities for plants of different types to move in, enhancing diversity. In short, this process prevents one species from growing everywhere and taking over everything. Although this may seem like common sense, scientists disagree a lot about how to measure it and what it really means for diversity. This award will bring many of those scientists together to figure out a path forward. Scientists from many types of institutions and career stages will be invited, including from primarily undergraduate institutions, early career researchers and members of underrepresented groups. All participants will be given opportunities to contribute to products resulting from the workshops, which will have important implications for predicting how plants will respond to environmental stresses. This series of workshops has two main objectives. First, organizers will bring together top researchers to develop robust approaches that use cutting-edge modeling techniques to assess whether local interactions among plants – specifically, conspecific negative density-dependence -- contribute to plant species diversity. The approaches that emerge from these meetings will likely become standardized methodologies, providing a much-needed common currency to evaluate ecological influences on the maintenance of plant species diversity. Second, organizers will apply these newly developed approaches to long-term data on plant survival and growth from sites around the world. These analyses will test how diversity-maintaining interactions among plants change across climatic gradients and among different plant species as a function of their traits. Synthesized examination of these basic questions is the first step to transformational insights and further experimental studies into the importance of local interactions among plants in determining regional and global patterns of plant species diversity. To ensure these goals, multiple perspectives are essential. Therefore, the proposed series of workshops will actively engage and involve participants from a variety of career stages and backgrounds, including groups underrepresented in science.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.