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Event

Plant size distribution on islands

Title of the event Plant size distribution on islands
Series CIDAS lecture series
Organizer Campus-Institut Data Science (CIDAS)
Speaker Dr. Helena Bestová
Speaker institution CIDAS
Type of event Talk Series
Category Forschung
Registration required Nein
Details Summary
Plant size distribution relates to many important ecosystem properties such as productivity, biomass,
carbon storage capacity. Therefore, it is important to understand what are the determinants of plants
size distribution. Indeed, several studies already observed that plant size distribution is associated
with island area and isolation. However, in order to move from observations to predictions, we need
a mechanistic understanding. A promising venue is to improve a simple yet powerful model of species
diversity, the Theory of Island Biogeography (TIB), that has been developed over 60 years ago. TIB
and follow-up models uses island area and isolation to define a balance between species immigration
and extinction. TIB gives an estimate of species richness on islands, but relies on the assumption that
species are functionally equal. This means that every individual has equal chance to arrive and persist
on the island, no matter its size or other traits. Nonetheless immigration and extinction should scale
with plant size. Therefore, island biogeography models could (and should) be improved by
incorporating allometric (size related) components. We applied allometric TIB model to 500 islands
and their flora. We used the information on available in GIFT and TRY databases, which are the most
extensive collections of data on floras and traits. They enabled ecologists to incorporate plant traits
in biodiversity models. However, these databases contain a lot of missing data, even though the
missing information can be found in thousands of scatter resources such as Floras, monographs and
scientific papers. To harness this information for macroecological research, we are developing
machine learning models for natural language processing and an automated trait-mining workflow.
This will allow us to mobilize previously neglected information from existing literature and fill gaps
in global trait databases, improve our models and facilitate future research.
Date Start: 01.12.2022, 14:15 Uhr
Ende: 01.12.2022 , 15:15 Uhr
Location Anderer Ort / Other Location
Informatik Provisorium Raum 0.102
Das Informatik Provisorium ist nahe der Goldschmidtstraße 1 zu finden.
Contact 0551 39-21289
isabelle.matthias@uni-goettingen.de
External link https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/653203.html