Aquatic Food Web Ecology Lab, Dalhousie University

Research in the Aquatic Food Web Ecology Lab based at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, focuses on the consequences of biodiversity loss to the functioning and stability of aquatic food webs. All of our work is done in a food web context, which means that its not just the numbers of species that we are interested in, but also the structure of the food webs in which those species are embedded. Most of our work is done in aquatic microcosms, small container ecosystems in which we can assemble food webs and then subject them to various types of disturbance regimes . We also use mathematical models to run "in silico" experiments, otherwise known as computer simulations, to study problems that are too complex or just not possible to conduct in natural systems.

Friday, May 7, 2010

Talks and kudos at the 2010 Lett Conference


Congrats are definitely in order for M.Sc. student Veronik Campbell who captured the best talk prize at the master's level at the 2010 Lett Symposium, a conference organized by graduate biology students at Dalhousie for her talk "Dynamics of populations on the edge of extinction".She, along with Constance Tuck, will also be presenting at the 2010 CSEE conference in Laval.Connie's talk "Robustness of Ecological Communities to Environmental Warming" also received very high praise and will also be presented at CSEE this year.
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Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Heida!


I don't know if we are more excited about eating Spätzle or learning to code the biodynamic model in C++ but either way we are very happy to be hosting Amrei Binzer, a visiting grad student from Uli Brose's lab in Germany this month. We are deep into species invasions simulations and thinking about lots of fun things like adding facilitation to the niche model. Thanks for loaning Amrei to us Uli!
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Saturday, May 1, 2010

Interested in learning more about our research?



Want to science-schmooze with us this summer?
We are heading out to a number of conferences....

5th Annual CSEE meeting
 May 9-12, 2010, Québec

Joint Meeting with ASLO & NABS
June 6-11, 2010, Santa Fe, New Mexico

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Devious strategies and disturbance


How do ecological communities respond to increasing disturbance? A recent paper published by us in PlosOne suggests that as the severity of a disturbance increases, functional groups begin to respond differently.....although the importance of having high functional group diversity to maintaining stability is conserved across all levels of environmental stress.

Romanuk TN, Vogt RJ, Young A, Tuck C, Carscallen MW (2010) Maintenance of Positive Diversity-Stability Relations along a Gradient of Environmental Stress. PLoS ONE 5(4): e10378. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010378

Related papers:

Romanuk, T.N., R.J. Vogt, and J. Kolasa. 2009.
Ecological realism and mechanisms by which diversity begets stability.
Oikos 118:819-828.

Romanuk, T.N., B. Beisner, N.D. Martinez, and J. Kolasa. 2006.
Non-omnivorous generality promotes population stability.
Biology Letters 2:374-377.

Romanuk, T.N., R.J. Vogt, and J. Kolasa. 2006.
Eutrophication weakens the stabilizing effect of diversity on community and population variability.
Oikos 114:291-302.

Vogt, R., T.N. Romanuk, and J. Kolasa. 2006.
Species richness-variability relationships in multi-trophic aquatic microcosms.
Oikos 113:55-66.

Romanuk, T.N., and J. Kolasa. 2004.
Population variability is lower in diverse rock pools when the obscuring effects of local processes are removed.
Ecoscience 11:455-462.

Romanuk, T.N., and J. Kolasa. 2002.
Environmental variability alters the relationship between species richness and community variability in natural rock pool microcosms.
Ecoscience 9:55-62.
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