Seminar: Two steps forward, one step back: the path to spatially explicit species interactions
Speaker: Dr. Laura Pollock, McGill University
To register for this event, please fill out the form here: https://forms.gle/k7jAwXxAa00HBpmC9
Abstract: Knowing how species interact in communities is essential for understanding biological communities, linking biodiversity and ecosystem services, and anticipating extinction risk. But we know very little about the interactions of most species in a community, even basic information (who eats whom in a food web). We know even less about how species interact across their ranges. Fortunately, interactions, particularly predator-prey links, can be predicted relatively well and matched to spatial data to form ‘local food webs’ that are spatially explicit. I will discuss some of these methods with examples of vertebrate food webs in Europe and Canada.
Bio: Laura Pollock is an Assistant Professor in the Biology Dept. at McGill University. She was previously a Marie-Curie fellow in France and a research fellow for the National Environmental Research Program at the Melbourne University in Australia. Her PhD is in eucalypt ecology and evolution and Msc is on coastal wetland change along the northern Gulf of Mexico.
