Research

Ecological communities are complex and continually changing. Understanding that complexity—and ultimately predicting how ecosystems will respond to environmental change—requires a combination of theory, experiments, new measurement technologies and quantitative analysis. The posts collected here describe several interconnected strands of our research. They range from early work on functional diversity to automated video microscopy and computer vision, experimental microbial ecology, response diversity and ecological stability, mathematical modelling, and ecological forecasting. They illustrate measuring how organisms differ and interact, through experimentally testing ecological mechanisms, to developing and evaluating models that seek to explain and predict the dynamics of ecological communities.

Research stories

From streams to forests: ecology in the natural world
Much of our research uses mathematical models and controlled microbial experiments to isolate ecological mechanisms, but an equally important question is whether those ideas…

Predicting ecosystem functioning: functional diversity
Biodiversity is often described by counting species. But species richness tells us relatively little about what those species do. Two communities might each contain 20…

Predicting ecological stability: response diversity
Why are some ecological communities relatively stable when their environment changes, while others fluctuate dramatically? Species richness provides only part of the answer.…

Experimental microbial ecology
How can we test ecological ideas that concern whole communities, multiple generations and changing environments? Field observations provide ecological realism, but many…

Video microscopy and computer vision
Microbial communities offer ecologists an unusual opportunity. Entire communities can be maintained in small laboratory microcosms, replicated extensively, and followed…

Mathematical modelling
Ecological systems contain many interacting processes, making it difficult to determine which mechanisms are responsible for an observed pattern. Mathematical models offer a…

Ecological forecasting
Ecology has traditionally been very good at explaining why ecological systems behaved as they did. A more demanding question is whether ecological understanding allows us to…

Calculating FD
Code and instructions for calculating FD, the measure of functional diversity that Owen and Kevin Gaston created. See Predicting ecosystem functioning: functional diversity f…

Food web tools
Code to model and analyse random, cascade, and niche food web models. These sit alongside the group’s broader work on predicting the architecture of food webs with…
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