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Thiago Rangel will give his Visiting Scientist seminar at the TULIP Forum.

Friday October 13 at 9:00 am - Lynn Margulis conference room - Pôle AgroBioSciences - INRAE Auzeville-Castanet

The Spatial, Temporal and Organizational Scales of Biodiversity: Simulation Models as Tools to Integrate Theory and Data

Ecology and evolutionary biology’s enduring challenge is to integrate and advance our understanding of natural phenomena across space, time, and levels of organization. Because ecological and evolutionary processes are structured across scales along these three dimensions, experimental and correlative studies cannot provide a full and meaningful description of how processes interact to generate patterns of biological diversity. Mechanistic simulation models have been used to evaluate existing theories and generate new ones, encompassing the organization and interaction of natural processes from local to global spaces, from generations to millions of years, and from genes to clades. Here I draw examples from the literature, including my own published work, that illustrate the potential of process-based simulation models as a tool to dissect and integrate spatial, temporal, and organizational scales. Together, these studies show a clear pathway to a coherent understanding of how biodiversity patterns are shaped by the effects of selection, adaptive evolution, speciation, extinction, range dynamics, competition, and climate dynamics, by using novel schemes to overcome the formidable challenges of building, applying, and evaluating simulation models.

Keywords: simulation, process-based models, space, time, organizational levels, adaptive evolution, biogeography, dispersal, extinction

Website : http://www.rangel.bio.br/#
Contact : thierry.oberdorff@ird.fr thiago.rangel@ufg.br