Bridging Levels from Individuals to Communities and Ecosystems: Including Adaptive Behavior and Feedbacks in Ecological Theory and Models

Abstract

Ecologists now recognize that the classical theory of population and community ecology is severely limited by its inability to represent the efffects of individual adaptive behavior, but we are still looking for ways to accommodate adaptive behavior in models and theory. This issue is important because the behavior of individuals can strongly affect the responses of animal populations to habitat restoration and other alterations of the environment, as well as to direct interactions with people. This meeting review describes a series of talks that addressed how mechanistic individual-based models can address this problem.