Symposium summary: Towards new directions and collaborations in macroecology

Abstract

news and update symposium summary Towards new directions and collaborations in macroecology 6 th Annual Meeting of the Specialist Group for Macroecology of the Ecological Society of Germany, Austria and Switzerland (GfO) – Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 29 th February–3 rd May 2012 This year, Katrin Bohning-Gaese’s group (Biodiversity and Climate Research Center, BiK-F), with support from the Senckenberg Gesellschaft fur Naturforschung and the Ecological Society of Germany, Austria and Switzerland (GfO) hosted the annual meeting of the Macroecology Specialist Group. Over 100 people attended the conference and participated in a full schedule of events including stimulating talks and posters (6 keynotes, 24 contributed talks, 18 posters), a lively panel discussions on publication in ecology and reflections of the keynote speakers on the novelty of the conference and future research directions in macroecology 1 . The conference opened with a warm welcome from Katrin Bohning-Gaese who set the stage for the meeting with an inspiring overview of macroecology research at the BiK-F. This presentation was followed by Carsten Rahbek who challenged the audience to “think big” and take on long-unresolved challenges in macroecology by embracing new tools (i.e., genomics, ancient DNA), gathering more empirical data and extending collaboration among research labs and different types of scientists. (Macro) ecologists should not be too modest in composing large research projects! The major themes of the conference included: macroecological patterns and their underlying causes; niches, distributions, communities and phylogenies under global change; advances in modelling, which included both theoretical and statistical approaches aimed at including more biological realism in models; and extinctions, conservation and new frontiers. Macroecological topics ranged from consideration of ecologically mediated diversity limits when evaluating diversification rates (Yael Kisel) to quantification of spatial and environmental effects of beta diversity in China’s woody plants (Zhiheng Wang), and evaluation of the biogeographic patterns/hypotheses of thermal melanism in European dragonflies (Dirk Zeuss). Presentations and posters under the themes of niches, distribution, communities and phylogenies under global change extended current state-of-the-art attempts to integrate these multiple types of data to address big questions in macroecology and biogeography. For instance, Sebastien Lavergne evaluated whether past rates of niche evolution influenced current demographic trends in European birds; Rafael Wuest explored how species pool definition influences inference about mechanisms (i.e., environmental filtering or biotic interactions) that structure assemblage composition; Dieter Thomas Tietze presented a poster evaluating different mechanisms causing variation in diversity gradients in Himalayan birds; and Sarah Whitmee teased apart phylogenetic relatedness and geographic location to evaluate patterns of range filling in mammals. Advances in modelling included elegant examples of new process-based Bayesian models (Florian Hartig), models integrating statistical and mechanistic models (Oliver Schweiger), combining multiple interacting species, speciation and demography (Juliano Sarmento Cabral and Miguel B. Araujo) as well as macroecological simulation studies that explored what patterns emerge when specific ecological and evolutionary processes are considered (David Orme). Finally, broad-scale process-based dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) were presented by Thomas Hickler who drew comparisons between these ecophy- siological and macroecological models and called for further integration of the two approaches. The last overarching topic (extinctions, 1 See program abstracts for complete details: http://www.bik-f.de/files/veranstaltungen/gfoe_macroecology/ homepage_program_full.pdf frontiers of biogeography 4.1, 2012 — © 2012 the authors; journal compilation © 2012 The International Biogeography Society