A Marriage of Models and Maps: Community Theory and Species Distribution Models

Monday, February 20, 2017: 9:00 AM-10:30 AM
Room 309 (Hynes Convention Center)
James Thorson, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Seattle, WA
Community ecology has seen tremendous advances in recent decades. However, community models are rarely fitted to time series and spatially referenced field data. I therefore summarize recent efforts to unify community theory with spatio-temporal statistics. Using case studies involving the Bering Sea and Gulf of St. Lawrence, I show that multivariate spatio-temporal models can capture dominant patterns in community dynamics while estimating species interactions and community stability.