CROSS-SCALE TEMPORAL ECOLOGY FOR COMMUNITIES IN A DYNAMIC WORLD (Invited Presentation)

In recent decades, a growing understanding of spatial scaling has driven a revolution in our understanding of ecological communities; ecologists have built on the early study of communities at single point locations, and now routinely integrate insights across spatial scales in landscape ecology and macroecology. Meanwhile, a century of paleoecological research has yielded important insights into the dynamics of ecological communities through time, particularly in response to changing environments. Insights at both short and long timescales have challenged conceptions of communities as discrete phenomena, replacing static models with dynamic perspectives of communities as individualistic distributions of populations across space and time. A growing nexus of researchers are studying dynamic systems across timescales spanning days to eons, but these approaches have yet to be integrated. The development of temporal ecology is driving a much-needed shift in perspectives on community dynamics across scales. Communities are dynamic entities, and may shift dramatically in response to changing environments; they exhibit complex dynamics, including stochasticity and abrupt shifts, disequilibrium and lags, priority or incumbency effects, and alternative stable states. They change not only in composition, but in interaction structure. Some may even exhibit surprising stasis even in the face of large environmental changes. These complex dynamics highlight the failures of the traditional hierarchical perspectives on community assembly processes, as understanding these complex dynamics is not possible without acknowledging the changing, interactive roles of evolution, history, and chance, dispersal, abiotic filtering, and biotic interactions though space and time. In this talk, I will explore research themes that demand an improved, integrated understanding of temporal dynamics across timescales, provide an integrated synthesis of the state of understanding of community dynamics, and identify new opportunities for cross-temporal collaboration.