Other Seminars

Chris Field is the 40th H.J. Oosting Lecturer. Field is the founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, Professor of Biology and Environmental Earth System Science at Stanford University, and Faculty Director of Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Field's research emphasizes impacts of climate change from molecular to global scales.

Spatial autocorrelation is a pervasive and biologically important component of ecological communities. Ecologists have typically viewed spatial autocorrelation as a nuisance, but in this talk I will outline two quantitative frameworks that harness the spatial signature of communities to infer which ecological processes are driving community assembly. These frameworks are unified by the concept of the community variogram which provides a useful tool for both describing community pattern and developing null hypotheses related to species associations.

Fall 2010 Environment and Ecology Seminar Series, sponsored by the Curriculum for the Environment and Ecology and the Institute for the Environment. These weekly seminars bring distinguished local and national speakers to UNC to present cutting edge research from across the Ecological Sciences. Seminars will be held on Thursdays at 4:00pm in Wilson Hall, Room 128. Light refreshments will be served prior to the seminar, and please join us afterwards for happy hour at Top of the Hill. http://www.cee.unc.edu/seminars.cfm

Climate change (altered CO2, warming, and altered precipitation) may affect plant-microbial interactions, such as the Lolium arundinaceum – Neotyphodium coenophialum symbiosis, to alter future ecosystem structure and function. To assess this possibility, tall fescue tillers and various ecosystem responses were monitored at two climate manipulation experiments: one in an old field community in Tennessee, and the second in a managed grassland/pasture system in central Kentucky.