Multi-scale structure of ecological communities

变异划分与多尺度PCNM分析相结合，使研究人员能够区分环境控制(基于生态位)和群落动态(中性过程)的互补过程的结果。我的长期研究目标是测试关于生态系统中这些过程的假设。这一点非常重要，因为贝塔多样性的数量变化或其空间组织的变化表明生态系统中的自然或人为变化。在我的职业生涯中，我学会了将群落生态学和统计学结合起来，创造了新的数值方法，事实证明，这些方法对群落生态学的进步至关重要。提案中描述了我将在下一个5年周期中探索的新途径。这项工作只能由一组有统计学倾向的科学家完成，他们了解主要的生态问题，并能够与统计学和计算机科学的研究人员建立联系。基础生态学：我们将分析生态系统中大范围物理过程与当地环境条件的相对重要性。在更精细的尺度上，我们将评估中立与基于利基的过程的相对重要性。将PCNM分析应用于多变量生态时间序列。它还将扩展到测试历史事件在塑造当今社区方面的重要性，提供关于正在进行的人为变化对社区影响的线索。推广四角分析，使其结果更加丰富的生态信息。第四角分析将被纳入一种新的变异划分形式，用于研究物种特征和环境特征之间的部分关系，同时控制众所周知的环境变量的影响。方法论发展：我们将为多元回归树(MRT)研究中的模型选择开发新的统计学。我们还将为多物种调查中的时空相互作用开发一种新的测试，而不需要复制。我们将把我们用于海底测绘的单波束声纳方法和我们的SonarX R语言库扩展到多波束声纳，从而提供更丰富的信息。

Variation partitioning, combined with multi-scale PCNM analysis, allows researchers to differentiate the resuls of the complementary processes of environmental control (niche-based) and community dynamics (neutral processes). My long-term research objective is to test hypotheses about these processes in ecosystems. This is of great importance because quantitative changes in beta diversity, or changes in its spatial organization, indicate natural or anthropogenic changes in ecosystems. During my career, I learned to combine community ecology and statistics, creating new numerical methods that proved to be of prime importance for the progress of community ecology. The new avenues that I will explore during the next 5-year cycle are described in the Proposal. That work can only be done by teams of statistically-inclined scientists who understand the primary ecological questions and are able to relate to researchers in statistics and computer sciences.Fundamental ecology: we will analyze ecosystems for the relative importance of broad-scale physical processes versus local environmental conditions. At finer scales, we will assess the relative importance of neutral versus niche-based processes. PCNM analysis will be applied to multivariate ecological time series. It will also be extended to test the importance of historical events in shaping present-day communities, providing clues about the effect of ongoing anthropogenic changes on communities. Fourth-corner analysis will be generalized to make its results richer in ecological information. Fourth-corner analysis will be incorporated into a new form of variation partitioning for the study of partial relationships between species traits and environmental characteristics while controlling for the effect of well-understood environmental variables. Methodological developments: we will develop new statistics for model selection in the study of multivariate regression trees (MRT). We will also develop a new test for the space-time interaction in multi-species surveys without replication.  We will extend our single-beam sonar methodology for seafloor mapping and our SonarX R-language library to multi-beam sonars, which provide more information-rich sonar returns.