How Animals Shape Ecosystems: An African Perspective скачать в хорошем качестве

How Animals Shape Ecosystems: An African Perspective

Dr. Andrew Davies - Harvard University How do animals shape our planet? Do their roles matter when compared with other seemingly obvious and dominant drivers such as climate, soils, topography or plants? These have been core questions in ecology for over half a century, yet the contributions made by animals to large-scale environmental processes and patterns remain elusive and difficult to quantify. The overarching goal of Dr. Davies' research program is to measure and understand these animal-driven contributions to large-scale environmental processes, and to compare their magnitude to abiotic and anthropogenic drivers, enabling a full-system understanding of how ecosystems function and how they might change in response to global change. In this talk, Andrew will draw on the fields of community and ecosystem ecology, animal behavior, and remote sensing to explore multiple facets of animal-ecosystem interactions in a spatially explicit manner, examining how animals interact with the environment and each other to affect ecosystem functioning at landscape scales.