Multitrophic Community Assembly
Two processes, environmental filtering and limiting similarity, are commonly thought to drive community patterns of functional diversity. Environmental filters are predicted to create a functionally clustered community, wherein all members have similar traits adapted to living with the same abiotic pressures. Species interactions like competition can create a functionally overdispersed community, where species are more likely to coexist if they occupy distinct areas of niche space and don’t compete for the same resources. However, interactions between functional diversity and structure across trophic levels have been relatively unexplored, despite the known impacts of top-down and bottom-up effects on species diversity.
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Eelgrass fishes of Bodega Harbor, Tomales Bay, and Drakes Estero
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In the eelgrass beds of Northern California, I study the effects of predator community structure on prey community structure. These eelgrass beds are home to a wide array of fish species that feed on a diverse community of epifaunal mesograzers, presenting a unique opportunity to examine how the functional traits and structure of predator communities affect those of their prey. As part of my PhD research, I am interested in whether the functional trait structure present in fish communities affect the trait values their distributions in epifaunal communities. Fishes may drive competition for enemy-free space, leading to a functionally overdispersed community with non-overlapping traits, or may drive epifaunal species with certain key predator-avoidance traits to dominance, leading to clustering.
This research is being conducted on Coast Miwok land. |
Epifaunal crustaceans of Bodega Harbor, Tomales Bay, and Drakes Estero
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