Traits, Niches and Climate as common coinage

a workshop sponsored by
Integrative Climate change Biology Programme (iCCB) in partnership with the Swiss national IUBS committee

Background

Traits have become an increasingly important focus in ecological, evolutionary and climatic research. While trait-based approaches to botanical systems are relatively well developed, the study of animal systems lags behind. One exciting thing about trait-based approaches is that traits can bridge between past and future because they can be studied in the fossil record as well as the modern world. This workshop aims to collaboratively develop modelling that integrates plant, animal and climate interactions based on traits. This workshop follows the highly successful workshop held in Frankfurt am Main in October 2011.

The workshop is composed of participants from previous meetings, with new invited leading experts on trait-based modelling. The main focus of the workshop will be how to deliver trait-based ecological niche models (ENM) for past time periods, how to combine trait-based ENMs with existing taxonomic ENMs, and to identify the limitations that palaeo data enforce on these exercises. Important questions to be discussed include: What role does evolution and phylogenies have on this? What effects do trait heritability and ecophenotypic plasticity have? One major theme will also be marrying the climate models and ENMs for past time periods: can this be done, how, what options there are. Discussion of combining concepts from zoological and botanical subdisciplines will also take place.

More Information

• Online registration
  

• Programm
  
• Directions to the Meeting place
• Accomodation
  
• Travel Reimbursement: Will be covered by iCCB, details later
  
  
  

Contact Information

Logistics

Jussi T. Eronen
Department of Geosciences and Geography
University of Helsinki
P.O. Box 64
00014 University of Helsinki, Finland
jussi.t.eronen@helsinki.fi

P. David Polly
Departments of Geological Sciences,
Biology and Anthropology
1001 E. 10^th Street
Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
pdpolly@indiana.edu