Testing ecological theory with data



The emergence of macroecology–coupled with the availability of long-term monitoring ecological datasets–has allowed for the testing and forecasting of ecological interactions at global scales.  Community stability is hypothesized to increase with species richness and decrease with interspecific synchrony. Despite (a)synchrony being fundamental to the maintenance of diversity over time, there are few large-scale empirical tests of such theory, mainly focusing on terrestrial plants (Valencia et al. 2020).  As a leading postdoc in the Blue-Green Biodiversity research initiative project, I compiled by far the largest collection of community time series LTER data (>=20 years) across terrestrial and freshwater taxa and tested how community synchrony could be understood by species richness, overall synchrony (variance ratio) and tail-dependent synchrony (Submitted). This work will open up more investigations across scales to get a better mechanistic understanding of community stability in the face of global change. For example, see these preprints (1, 2) to understand the mean-variance fluctuation relationships in time, and mechanisms behind changing community stability due to temperature change. 

Publications


Temperature change and biodiversity influence community stability differently in birds and fishes


Shyamolina Ghosh, Blake Matthews, Owen Petchey

Nature Ecology & Evolution, Springer Nature, 2024


Synchrony and tail-dependent synchrony have different effects on the stability of terrestrial and freshwater communities


Shyamolina Ghosh, Blake Matthews, Sarah R Supp, Roel Van Klink, Francesco Pomati, James Rusak, Imran Khaliq, Niklaus Zimmermann, Thomas Wohlgemuth, Ole Seehausen, others

Authorea, Inc., 2023


Project BioDyn: compilation of long-term (>20yrs) community timeseries data from terrestrial and freshwater realms


Shyamolina Ghosh, Blake Matthews, Sarah R. Supp, Roel van Klink, Francesco Pomati, James A. Rusak, Imran Khaliq, Niklaus E. Zimmermann, Ole Seehausen, Christian Rixen, Martin M. Gossner, Anita Narwani, Jonathan M. Chase, Catherine H. Graham

Zenodo, 2023 Aug





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