February 13, 2023

12:00pm, PST 1100 TLSB

Chuliang Song
Princeton University

" Understanding ecological dynamics with incomplete information "

*Please note the day of this seminar.

A central quest in ecological research is to understand the ecological dynamics maintaining biodiversity. However, when making strong and robust assessments of ecological dynamics, a fundamental challenge is that we very rarely possess complete information about the entire ecological system. To address this challenge, my talk will focus on three major questions. First, given that an ecological community only assembles once, how can we understand if the order of species arrivals influence community stability? Second, given that we can only measure a subset of species, how can we quantify the stability of the whole ecological community from measures of the subset? Third, given that an ecological system harbors many interactions, how can we detect which interactions are evolving on ecological timescales? In sum, my talk shows how carefully designed theory allows rigorous extrapolation and prediction from limited data.

Host: Morgan Tingley