Speaker: Nate Swenson (University of Maryland)

Summary:
A significant portion of our planet's biodiversity is held within temperate, subtropical and tropical forests. This biodiversity plays a key role in regulating Earth's climate while providing crucial ecosystem services for our exploding human population. Despite this importance, the processes that produce and maintain levels of biodiversity within and across forested ecosystems remain poorly understood. This lack of understanding not only applies to diverse tropical forests, but also less diverse subtropical and temperate forests. Furthermore, the insights we have about biodiversity in forested ecosystems primarily concern the distribution and dynamics of species diversity. We know far less about the processes regulating the functional diversity in forests, which is likely to be more closely related to ecosystem function and services and more informative regarding the drivers of forest structure and dynamics.

Ecologists are increasingly demonstrating that functional diversity is often a superior predictor of ecosystem function and community dynamics than species diversity. Despite these successes, there are  limitations to this line of research, which depends on the measurement of a handful of easily measured phenotypic traits. Specifically, the traits measured are only proxies of the physiological processes of interest, are weakly or not at all related to demographic rates, and do not include information regarding potentially important known and unknown axes of function (i.e., functional dark matter). An increasingly feasible way to overcome these limitations is through the generation and interrogation of transcriptomic information. Transcriptomes can now be estimated quickly and relatively cheaply for non-model organisms, and they provide a snapshot of the aspects of the genome that are being transcribed (i.e., the functional genome). I argue that integrating a large amount of detailed information, such as that provided by transcriptomes, into existing functional trait-based approaches in ecology could help overcome many previous limitations. In this seminar, I will present this argument and evidence from my research group that indicates forest ecology is on the verge of being rapidly transformed via transcriptomic information where long-standing unanswered questions can be addressed in unprecedented detail.