Life Sciences Commons^™

Beta-Diversity Patterns And Community Assembly Across Latitudes, Emma Moran

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A major goal of community ecology is in understanding variation in community composition, generally termed β-diversity. This variation can result from a variety of mechanisms, including deterministic factors, wherein species sort along biotic or abiotic gradients; stochastic processes, whereby random fluctuations in population sizes cause variation in community composition; and/or dispersal limitation. Although all of these processes are likely occurring in all biological communities, a key question in community ecology research is if their relative importance may vary systematically across environmental or biogeographic gradients. In this dissertation, we combine both observational and experimental research to investigate β-diversity across a biogeographic …