From communities to ecosystems: linking ecological responses to multiple global change drivers - Livestream

Global change is altering resource availability, which in turn is predicted to change the composition and functioning of communities. Here, I synthesize plant and ecosystem responses to resource manipulations from over 100+ global change experiments in the CoRRE (Community Responses to Resource Experiments) database. First, we show that community composition changes are greater than changes in richness alone. Next, we explore methods to study community compositional changes based on rank-abundance curves. We show that plant communities are changing in dynamic ways, with no one best measure to study these changes. The synthesis demonstrates the need to take a wholistic approach to studying community changes. Finally, I explore how ecosystem production is affected by resource experiments through changes in community composition.

Speaker:  Kimberly Komatsu, Senior Scientist, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

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