Ehud Meron (Ben-Gurion University) | Ecosystem responses to climate change across different levels of organization |
Abstract:
Understanding the response of dryland vegetation to climate extremes, such as severe droughts, is of utmost importance in light of the crucial ecosystem services that dryland vegetation provides to humans and the projections for more frequent and intense events in the future. The response is likely to involve mechanisms operating at different levels of ecological organization, including phenotypic changes (organism level), spatial self-organization (population level) and community reassembly (community level). In this talk I will describe the modeling approach that we use to study multi-level responses, and new dynamical behaviors that emerge from such responses. These include multi-scale spatial patterning induced by phenotypic changes from shallow-roots to deep-roots plants along with spatial self-organization, and a homeostatic-like effect of spatial patterning on community composition and species diversity. Relations of some of the results to fairy-circle patterns in Namibia will be discussed.
When: June 1, 2022 2:00 PM (Israel Standard Time).
Where: Room 223, Multipurpose Bldg. & over Zoom