Natural Resources
Building, Room 314

Mailing address:
Ecology Center
Utah State University
UMC 5205
Logan, UT 84322
Phone: (435)-797-2555
Fax: (435)-797-3872

EC Seminar Series

Most of the focus on climate change has been either on mitigation (how to put less carbon in the air) or adaptation for humans (what can humans do to ameliorate the impacts on their societies). But the truth is that in the developed world, humans will be able to spend their way out of many of the problems. It may well be that 100 years from now that the single most regretted effect of climate change in the developed world will be the impact on our fields and forests, which may change beyond recognition. The paleontological record provides a broad-brush view of what to expect. But our development of specific predictive models that are helpful to managers has been mostly limited to relatively simple, correlative models. I will raise some issues with these models, and describe some work I have been doing to take small steps to better prediction. I will then address the question of does it even matter if we improve our science in this area? The public attitude to climate change has been a wake-up call for scientists about the need to do science in a new, more engaged way. I will describe alternative approaches being advocated in the social science literature and the implications of this for scientists.

Many of the most central and heavily studied patterns in ecology center on abundance, distribution, and biodiversity. These include latitudinal patterns in species richness, species-area relationships, species abundance distributions, etc. The past decade has seen at least six different attempts to provide unified approaches to explain these patterns. I will show that there are some core underlying assumptions that are common to all of these approaches. I will then generalize this to present two mathematical frameworks that capture these common approaches. I will conclude by discussing the implications and future directions in this research agenda.