Oceanography Seminar

April 17, 3:00pm - 4:15pm
Mānoa Campus, Marine Sciences Building, MSB 100 Add to Calendar

Kyle Edwards
Assistant Professor
Department of Oceanography
University of Hawaii at Manoa

“Parsing ecological complexity in phytoplankton communities”

Abstract: Oceanographers and ecologists would like to be able to predict how ecosystems function under different conditions, but the incredible diversity of biological communities presents a serious challenge. In this talk I will describe some past work and future directions that focus on the rules that underlie phytoplankton communities, and how these scale up to determine aggregate ecosystem processes. Lab-measured traits can be used to test why community structure shifts across environmental gradients, and the ways these traits covary across species may reveal tradeoffs and trait syndromes that constrain how species evolve and how ecosystems function. One important direction for future work is quantifying how temperature interacts with the factors that limit population growth (light, nutrients, grazers, viruses) to determine community composition and aggregate rates.


Ticket Information
FREE

Event Sponsor
Oceanography, Mānoa Campus

More Information
(808) 956-7633

Share by email