Abstract: Ecologists study relationships among environmental and biological variables to understand the effect of ongoing global changes on population, community, or ecosystem levels across space and time. However, standard approaches to studying such relationships, mostly based on correlation and regression, provide limited information. With the increasing availability of ecological data, it is now possible to explore such complex relationships with new quantitative tools. I would like to introduce the usefulness of “copula” statistics for ecologists - can we learn something new about the dependence patterns among ecological variables beyond the usual correlation approach? With a few examples, I will explain my past research, i.e., how to detect such dependence patterns, especially at the extreme values (or tails), the probable mechanisms behind them, and why one should care about such patterns. Extending this concept, my current research focuses on a mechanistic understanding of how community stability, diversity, and interspecific response change over time. In the future, my research group will focus on understanding the mechanisms behind spatiotemporal patterns in the context of climatic extremes and anthropogenic stressors - especially when multiple drivers act simultaneously. I feel this interdisciplinary research direction, spanning from ecology to environmental science, is very apt for the near future to understand and predict global change across ecological organizations.

Meeting ID: 910 3637 2666
Passcode: 062939