VIGRE Research Group
Defining Ecosystem Health

Group Picture
Organizer: Caner Kazancı
Schedule: Friday, 2:30pm, Boyd Room 302.

Projects

Decomposition of general ecological networks - Drew, Qianqian and Maury

Systems ecology takes a holistic approach in studying organisms by embedding them in their natural habitat and investigating their behavior as they mutually interact with other organisms. Ecological networks can be fairly complicated. Decomposing a complicated ecosystem into sub networks for easier analysis is often tempting. However, essential ecosystem behavior may be lost by breaking connections. For simpler models, we can identify flow sub-networks without breaking connections. We will investigate if this decomposition is always possible, or if is unique; and try to create an algorithm that can decompose any ecological network into its sub flow networks.

Decomposition of ecological network properties - Rebecca, Drew and Chip

In relation to the decomposition problem above, we investigate how various system-wide ecological network properties of the full network carry into the decomposed flow sub networks.

Effects of "compartment lumping" on ecological network properties - Chip, Nicole and Qianqian

One of the fundamental challenges of analyzing ecosystems lies in deciding how best to represent them, known as "The modeling problem". Model complexity increases rapidly with an increasing number of model compartments, and parameterization of more complex models is exceptionally challenging, so ecosystem models typically include compartments representing multiple species. In this project, we will focus on a series of models of four different habitat types in the Everglades created by the ATLSS project which range from 68-125 compartments. For each of these models, we will create a nested subset of models lumping these categories in a biologically-realistic manner, and analyze the effect that these subjective modeling decisions have on ecological network indices.

Modeling Effects of Parasites on Ecosystem Function - Nicole and Maury

There is recent evidence that parasites and pathogens can influence species composition and food web structure in ecosystems, but can they affect ecosystem function? The purpose of this project will be to evaluate how parasites and pathogens can affect the ecosystem functions, namely in the transfer and storage of energy and matter within the ecosystem.

Announcements

  • 09/15 We meet in front of Ecology this week to take a picture...

Documents & Materials

  • 01/23 Paper by Santanu Ray titled "Comparative study of virgin and reclaimed islands of Sundarban mangrove ecosystem through network analysis".
  • 01/23 Paper by B. Fath and S. Borett titled "A MATLAB function for Network Environ Analysis".
  • 01/23 Paper by Fath et. al. titled "Complementarity of Ecological Goal Functions".
  • 09/15 Earlier paper on computing cycling using a form of network decomposition.
  • 09/15 Two papers on FBA: one, two.
  • 09/15 A Paper on taxonomic aggregation, related to Chip's project.
  • 09/15 Detailed proposal by Nicole on Modeling Effects of Parasites on Ecosystem Function.
  • 09/05 Today's presentation on Network Environ Analysis.
  • 08/29 Paper by B. Fath and B. Patten on Review of Network Environ Analysis.
  • 08/29 Today's presentation on simple ecosystem models.
  • 08/19 Introductory lecture on this VIGRE research group.
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