This week, Dr Elisa Thébault, senior researcher at the Ecology and Environmental Sciences Institute of the CNRS, and Sorbonne University, in Paris, is in Swansea for a short visit.

Elisa will share her research with us at the Biosciences Department Seminar Series on Friday 7th of February at 10.30 in the Zoology Museum.

About Elisa:

Elisa is a researcher at the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Sciences of Paris (Sorbonne University, CNRS). She is mainly interested in studying the responses of communities and ecosystems to global changes and to better understand the links between diversity, structure of networks of interactions between species and stability of ecosystem functioning, with a particular interest in better linking theoretical approaches of mathematical modelling to experimental or empirical approaches.

SEMINAR

Species diversity, food web structure and the temporal stability of ecosystems

ABSTRACT

The consequences of diversity and food web structure on the stability of ecological communities have been debated for more than 5 decades. While the understanding of the relation between diversity and the stability of properties at community and ecosystem levels has gained from joint empirical, experimental and theoretical insights, the question of the relation between food web structure and stability has received almost exclusively theoretical attention. The lack of empirical studies on this issue is partly due to the fact that theoretical studies are often disconnected from the stability of natural ecosystems, and to the difficulty of describing and manipulating food web structure in the field. Here I will present the results of two studies aiming to investigate the relations between diversity, food web structure and the stability of community-level properties.

All Welcome!