In what ways do the mechanisms of coexistence impact the strength of biodiversity effects on ecosystems and the way these effects scale across space and time?
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My dissertation, "Mechanisms of Coexistence: Implications for Biodiversity-Ecosystem Functioning Relationships in a Changing World", focused (as the title suggests) on how understanding the processes underlying the maintenance of biodiversity (aka species coexistence).
Specifically, I examined:
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a nutrient and space partitioning mechanism (vertical root niche differentiation) in a warming x diversity experiment within a long-term biodiversity experiment at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve.
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a soil microbial based coexistence mechanism (plant species specific plant-soil microbe feedbacks, aka Janzen-Connell effects), which is tested using a greenhouse diversity experiment seeded with different combinations of plant species and inoculated with soil from different monocultures and high diversity plots from the long-term field experiment
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I continue to work on this, with a current project examining how global change drivers interrupt specific coexistence mechanisms and how this will impact biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in the here and now, and also in the long-term and over large, policy relevant spatial scales. Contact me if you're interested in discussing further! It's my current favorite thing to talk about!