Month: March 2021

Methods papers, Statistical methods

How to assess seed bank effect in a plant metapopulation

Post provided by Apolline Louvet

Tree base in an urban area, partly occupied by spontaneous vegetation. Picture credit: Apolline Louvet.

Seed banks play a key role in plant metapopulations, however, detecting seed banks remains challenging. The current method of assessing the effect of seed banks on plant metapopulation dynamics focuses on the presence of standing vegetation. This has direct implications for plant metapopulation models, which require data on the absence of a seed bank to understand plant dynamics.

Our paper, ‘Detecting seed bank influence on plant metapopulation dynamics’ in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, introduces a new metric on plant metapopulations, which assesses the seed bank contribution to the global observed dynamics. In this post, we recall what led us to develop this metric.

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Methods papers, Statistical methods

What happens to our understanding of functional diversity when we ignore intraspecific trait variability?

Post provided by Mark Wong

Impressive variability sometimes occurs within a species, such as between these sister ants from the same Carebara sp. colony. Credit: Francois Brassard.

Throw a rock at a conference and you’ll likely hit an ecologist who examines the variation among organisms’ functional traits for one reason or another. From understanding the assembly of communities and their responses to environmental change, to the effects of biodiversity on ecosystem functions, and – well, why not – modelling the global spectrum of ecological form and function, assessments of functional diversity have quickly become the bread and butter of community, ecosystem and macro ecology.

In this blog post, Mark Wong discusses his paper ‘Including intraspecific trait variability to avoid distortion of functional diversity and ecological inference: lessons from natural assemblages’, recently published in Methods in Ecology & Evolution.

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