Project Details
Projekt
Synthesis area 5: Functional Island Biogeography Across Trophic Levels
Applicants
Professor Dr. Ulrich Brose; Professorin Susanne Fritz, Ph.D.; Professor Dr. Christian Hof; Professor Dr. Holger Kreft
Subject Area
Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 379417748
In recent years, functional island biogeography has emerged as a new discipline that studies the relevance of functional traits in the assembly of island communities, usually at large spatio-temporal extents. Conceptual frameworks from community ecology have been combined with metacommunity theory and food web research to develop a mechanistic understanding and enable predictions of community assembly from a regional species pool. Despite this recent progress, it is still unclear to which extent traits are needed to predict community composition in island biogeography, and to which degree specific biological mechanisms and biogeographical variables contribute towards explaining the trait composition of island communities. Previous work at the scale of islands has usually been done within rather than across trophic levels, leading to potential underestimation of the effects of biotic interactions on community assembly. Building on the work completed in previous DynaCom phases, we aim to develop a synthesis across functional island biogeography and meta-food web theory, by combining empirical analyses of our global-scale datasets with mechanistic modelling of island community assembly across trophic levels (vascular plants and non-marine birds). Our empirical work and mechanistic model will consider and quantify the respective filtering effects of dispersal, environmental constraints, and biotic interactions among resources and consumers, and will allow us to assess the effects of functional traits on community composition across the three trait dimensions of movement, tolerance, and interaction identified in the general DynaCom framework.
DFG Programme
Research Units
