Tadashi Fukami, "Historical contingency in Ecological community assembly"

Tadashi Fukami

Stanford Univerity

"Historical contingency in Ecological community assembly"

It is increasingly recognized that the structure and function of ecological communities can be greatly influenced by the history of community assembly, or the order and timing in which different species immigrate as communities assemble. Such historical contingency makes it difficult to explain community structure and function because immigration history is rarely known. However, progress can be made by asking when history should matter. In this talk, I will describe our recent research indicating two neglected factors that may be important to predicting historical contingency: (1) evolutionary background of immigrating species and (2) transient dynamics of assembling communities. I will discuss evidence from our experimental and computational studies involving bacterial, yeast, and plant communities.