Tadashi Fukami
PhD, University of Tennessee (Ecology & Evolutionary Biology), 2003
Assistant Professor
Department of Zoology
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Honolulu, HI 96822, USA
tfukami@hawaii.edu
www2.hawaii.edu/~tfukami/, www.hawaii.edu/zoology/pollinationwebs.htm
www.marc.landcare.co.nz/research/ecosystems/rasp/

Matthew Knope (PhD) Marine community ecology and evolutionary genetics

I am seeking students to join my lab. Please e-mail me if you are interested.

Historical perspectives on communities and ecosystems

I study how ecological communities assemble and its implications for species diversity, ecosystem functioning, biological invasions, and ecological restoration. 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 and their consumers as a model system. I am doing field experiments on New Zealand islands to ask how top-down and bottom-up forces interact with community assembly history to affect fungal communities and how these interactions influence nutrient cycling in forests.

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

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

Representative publications

Fukami, T., Beaumont, H.J.E., Zhang, X.X. & Rainey, P.B. (2007) Immigration history controls diversification in experimental adaptive radiation. Nature, 446:436-439. (See also commentaries on this paper: Gillespie, R.G. & Emerson, B.C. (2007) Adaptation under a microscope. Nature, 446: 386-387. & Seehausen, O. (2007) chance, historical contingency and ecological determinism jointly determine the rate of adaptive radiation. Heredity, 99: 361-363.j)

Wardle, D.A., Bellingham, P.J., Fukami, T. & Mulder, C.P.H. (2007) Promotion of ecosystem carbon sequestration by invasive predators. Biology Letters, 3: 479-482.

Fukami, T., Wardle, D.A., Bellingham, P.J., Mulder, C.P.H., Towns, D. P., 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 9: 1299-1307.

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 invasions 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. (2005) Integrating internal and external dispersal in metacommunity assembly: preliminary theoretical analyses. Ecological Research 20: 623-631.

Fukami, T. & Wardle, D.A. (2005) Long-term ecological dynamics: reciprocal insights from natural and anthropogenic gradients. Proceedings of the Royal Society 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. (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.

[return to top]