Abstract: Ecologists are increasingly faced with needing to predict how populations of plants and animals will perform under new conditions. Climate change, invasions and other forms of global change provide new environmental contexts for plants and animals and their interactions. New biotic and abiotic conditions have impacts on growth, survival and reproduction which in turn determine whether populations increase, decrease or remain stable through time. In order to understand if new environments change whether or how populations persist we need a fundamental understanding of natural levels of variability within the species across the range of environments it occupies, this can be achieved through comprehensive surveys combined with mechanistic population processes. Demography, the measurement of growth, survival and reproduction, has typically been a local enterprise, but the advent of coordinated network research methods have extended the scope and scale of demographic research and enable general understanding set in local contexts. I will use recent research from my lab on plant and animal populations to discuss the global biogeography of population persistence.
Bio: Professor Yvonne Buckley is the Professor of Zoology at Trinity College Dublin and an Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland in Australia. She is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, an Irish Research Council Laureate Fellow and is a Highly Cited Researcher having produced multiple papers with citations in the top 1% across fields. She is Chair of the National Biodiversity Forum and past-President of the Irish Ecological Association. Professor Buckley is originally from North Cork and has lived and worked in the UK and Australia.
Further Information: If you have any questions regarding this seminar, please direct them to Romina Gaburro (061 2131930, email romina.gaburro@ul.ie or Clifford Nolan (061 202766), clifford.nolan@ul.ie).
Supported by Science Foundation Ireland funding, MACSI - the Mathematics Applications Consortium for Science and Industry (www.macsi.ul.ie), centred at the University of Limerick, is dedicated to the mathematical modelling and solution of problems which arise in science, engineering and industry in Ireland.
