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EV-17:
Testing ecological hypotheses with paleo-data
Wednesday, August 10, 8 PM - 10
PM, Meeting Rooms 514a-c, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
Organizers:
Sarah Finkelstein, Konrad Gajewski
Description: Paleoecological
datasets are useful for describing what ecosystems looked like in the past, how
they have changed, and how they responded to disturbances. There is more debate,
however, about how pollen records or sequences of other paleoecological
indicators can best be applied to testing specific hypotheses in community or
population ecology, and how they can be used to derive quantitative predictions
of ecosystem responses to environmental changes. Recent work suggests that
paleoecological datasets could be better exploited to test specific theories on
key processes in community ecology, such how lots of similar species coexist, or
what determines the resilience of an ecosystem. This evening session will gather
ecologists and paleoecologists to examine the following questions:
(1) Do paleoecological datasets provide the opportunity to test
quantitative ecological theories or models? (2) What are the theories that could
be most successfully tested, and which are the most important? (3) What do
ecologists see as limitations in paleo-data and how can paleoecologists respond
to these problems? and (4) More generally, is hypothesis testing in the
historical sciences possible? Panelists will include Steve Jackson, Jim Clark,
Andrew Gonzalez, and Bryan Shuman.
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