BES Conference 2019 – Belfast
Many of the group attended the annual British Ecological Society conference which was held this year in Belfast.
Ada, Gergana, Anne, Samanta and Jess all gave excellent presentations which were very well received.
Ada’s talk focused on fish communities from Trinidad and discussed how the metrics we use to calculate functional diversity, i.e. numerical abundance and biomass, capture different dimensions of change.
Gergana looked at how global change varies around the world and at what drives these changes.
Anne’s presentation looked at biodiversity change over time generally with a specific focus on linking alpha and beta diversity using species abundance distributions.
Samanta talked about her work studying amphibians (one of the most threatened taxa on the planet), and how she found that beta diversity of amphibians in ponds was most strongly driven by geographic distance.
Jess discussed (macro)ecological succession: general predictions for a universal process, where she shared the preliminary results of her exciting new simulation approach using demography to test community dynamics over time.