Tadashi Fukami

Assistant Professor
Department of Zoology

PhD 2003, University of Tennessee
Tadashi Fukami
Personal Website: http://www2.hawaii.edu/~tfukami/

              

 

 

Research Interests

I study how ecological communities assemble and its implications for species diversity, ecosystem functioning, biological invasions, and ecological restoration, both at ecological and evolutionary time scales. I use a variety of study systems and methods in collaboration with other biologists to address questions most effectively.


1. Species diversity: Species diversity often shows non-random patterns in relation to ecosystem productivity, ecosystem size, ecosystem connectivity, the size of the regional species pool, and other ecological variables. I have found that these patterns can depend on the history of community assembly, or more specifically, on the sequence and timing in which species attempt to join communities. For this work, I have used theoretical computer simulations and microbial microcosm experiments.


2. Ecosystem functioning: I am currently studying the ecosystem-level consequences of community assembly. How do historically derived differences in community structure affect the way ecosystems function? My main focus for this work has so far been wood-decay fungi as a model system. My collaborators and I are doing field and laboratory experiments in New Zealand to ask how top-down and bottom-up forces interact with community assembly history to affect fungal communities and how these interactions in turn influence nutrient cycling in forests.


3. Evolutionary diversification: I am interested in incorporating evolutionary diversification into community-assembly theory, which has largely been limited to ecological, as opposed to evolutionary, dynamics. For this, I am using the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens, which undergoes adaptive radiation in just a week in microcosms. In addition, Matt Knope, who recently started working with me, and I are currently setting up our lab for molecular phylogenetic approaches.


4. Other interests: I have also worked on sequence effects of disturbance on community structure, implications of community similarity for ecosystem functioning, and species divergence vs. trait convergence in community assembly. Other projects I have been involved in include across-ecosystem trophic cascades on New Zealand islands and plant-pollinator interactions on Hawaiian islands.

 

Selected Publications

Fukami, T., Wardle, D. A., Bellingham, P. J., Mulder, C. P. H., Towns, D. R., Yeates, G. W., Bonner, K. I., Durrett, M. S., Grant-Hoffman, M. N. & Williamson, W. M. (2006) Above- and below-ground impacts of introduced predators in seabird-dominated island ecosystems. Ecology Letters, in press.
Fukami, T. & Lee, W. G. (2006) Alternative stable states, trait dispersion, and ecological restoration. Oikos, 113: 353-356.
Cadotte, M. W., McMahon, S. M. & Fukami, T. (editors) (2006) Conceptual ecology and invasion biology: reciprocal approaches to nature. Springer, Dordrecht.
Fukami, T., Bezemer, T. M., Mortimer, S. R. & Van der Putten, W. H. (2005) Species divergence and trait convergence in experimental plant community assembly. Ecology Letters, 8: 1283-1290.
Fukami, T. & Wardle, D. A. (2005) Long-term ecological dynamics: reciprocal insights from natural and anthropogenic gradients. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B: Biological Sciences, 272: 2105-2115.
Cadotte, M. W. & Fukami, T. (2005) Dispersal, spatial scale, and species diversity in a hierarchically structured experimental landscape. Ecology Letters, 8: 548-557.
Fukami, T. (2005) Integrating internal and external dispersal in metacommunity assembly: preliminary theoretical analyses. Ecological Research, 20: 623-631.
Fukami, T. (2004) Assembly history interacts with ecosystem size to influence species diversity. Ecology, 85: 3234-3242.
Fukami, T. (2004) Community assembly along a species pool gradient: implications for multiple-scale patterns of species diversity. Population Ecology, 46: 137-147.
Fukami, T. & Morin, P. J. (2003) Productivity-biodiversity relationships depend on the history of community assembly. Nature, 424: 423-426.
Fukami, T., Naeem, S. & Wardle, D. A. (2001) On similarity among local communities in biodiversity experiments. Oikos, 95: 340-348.
Fukami, T. (2001) Sequence effects of disturbance on community structure. Oikos, 92: 215-224.
Fukami, T., Zimmermann, C. R., Russell, G. J. & Drake, J. A. (1999) Self-organized criticality in ecology and evolution. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 14: 321.