School of Physics Soft Condensed Matter & Biophysics Seminar: Prof. James O'Dwyer, UIUC

Macroecological patterns, like species abundance distributions and species-area curves, have often been claimed to display the same or similar behavior across many disparate ecological systems. This apparent universality has led ecologists to wonder whether the great complexity of natural systems can be mapped onto a smaller set of ecological 'rules' that then determine the form of these emergent patterns. If this assertion is true, it has implications for our understanding of emergent phenomena across a range of systems. In this talk I will introduce new macroecological patterns for microbial communities, centered around their phylogenetic diversity. Specifically, I will introduce a new method to identify bursts of branching appearing throughout these phylogenies, and a theoretical framework to interpret these patterns and their similarities and differences in different habitats. I’ll wrap up by summarizing what we don’t yet know, and work in progress in my lab to fill in these gaps.