Why should we care about joint forecasting
Sergio Marconi | 11 October 2018
Joint Habitat suitability models to facilitate assisted migrations In the perspective of dramatic changes in climate and environmental conditions, tree species will need to face adaptation and or migration strategies to avoid extinction. Despite adaptation and migration are common ecological processes in nature, they are usually slow for tree species. Strategies relying on creation of ecological corridors for natural migration may require too much time for sudden changes in climate, resulting in the extinction of sensible species. With this perspective, the core issue debated in Gray et al. (2011) and McLachlan et al. (2006) is to facilitate migration and acclimation...
read moreData Science Evaluation in Ecology
Sergio Marconi | 12 June 2018
Study biodiversity across scales is an hard task, and most likely data collected on the ground are not enough. Satellite and airborne images potentially provide continuous information about patterns and processes driving ecological systems. Using those data allow forests to be studied in detail at much larger scales than is currently possible. The problem, however, is that we are still far from knowing how to “read” remote sensing information. Hundreds of studies tried to develop such methods, but singularly on different datasets, making it hard to cross compare their relative efficiency.
read moreFunctional Ecology
Sergio Marconi | 12 September 2017
Why we do care so much about biodiversity? Do we care about species, what they represent, or maybe both? These questions are the center of Functional Ecology, a branch of Ecology focusing on the functions that biological units (i.e. individuals, species) have in a community at the scale of study (Calow, 1987). The term “function” emphasizes physiological processes. It is associated with the concept of functional trait, which is a set of chemical physical characteristics directly involved in ecological processes. For example, leaf nitrogen and thickness are functional traits involved in photosynthesis and resources distribution in plants. They are not...
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