LSA is the place for foundational knowledge where creative thinkers engage with a complex, diverse, and changing world. We need your support to fuel our innovative environment, invest in the brightest people, and advance tomorrow’s breakthroughs.
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB)
- Slide 0
- Slide 1
- Slide 2
Recent news
New exhibit, "Leaves under the Lens", curated by Phd student Rosemary Glos
Learn how tiny leaf structures protect leaves from herbivores, absorb (or repel) water, and even recruit tiny arthropod bodyguards. You won’t look at leaves the same way again!
Faculty Publication Spotlight: María Natalia Umaña in Ecology
The paper suggests that stage-specific leaf traits reflect different strategies over ontogeny and can substantially improve predictability of survival models in tropical forests.
RESEARCH FEATURE
EEB's grad student Matheus Januário, and professor Daniel Rabosky's paper "The Metapopulation Bridge to Macroevolutionary Speciation Rates: A Conceptual Framework and Empirical Test," in Ecology Letters.
Abstract: Whether large-scale variation in lineage diversification rates can be predicted by species properties at the population level is a key unresolved question at the interface between micro- and macroevolution. All else being equal, species with biological attributes that confer metapopulation stability should persist more often at timescales relevant to speciation and so give rise to new (incipient) forms that share these biological traits. Here, we develop a framework for testing the relationship between metapopulation properties related to persistence and phylogenetic speciation rates. We apply this conceptual approach to a long-term dataset on demersal fish communities from the North American continental shelf region. We find that one index of metapopulation persistence has phylogenetic signal, suggesting that traits are connected with range-wide demographic patterns. However, there is no relationship between demographic properties and speciation rate. These findings suggest a decoupling between ecological dynamics at decadal timescales and million-year clade dynamics, raising questions about the extent to which population-level processes observable over ecological timescales can be extrapolated to infer biodiversity dynamics more generally.
