Understanding how many species coexist is a central question in ecology. Central to most modern coexistence models are interactions among species. Most models of coexistence, however, assume that only direct competitive effects are important, and they exclude facilitation and more complex species interactions. The empirical literature tells us, however, that there are a wide range of common important species interactions that occur within natural communities, thus to predict and explain the coexistence dynamics that we see in nature, it is important to add more realistic representations of species interactions into our coexistence models. In this project we are exploring a range of species interactions with each other and the environment with the goal of improving our ability to predict and detect coexistence dynamics in natural plant communities. We employ a wide range of approaches but much of our work falls within the modern coexistence framework and our field studies are expanding on Mayfield and Stouffer 2017, which presents a novel framework for incorporating facilitation and non-additive higher-order interactions into coexistence models. Primarily we aim to develop and test new approaches for detecting and explaining observed coexistence dynamics in real plant communities, using the York Gum woodlands of SW Western Australia as our focal system.

Malyon Bimler
Hanlun Liu

Students

Lisa Buche (PhD)
(Winnie) Wing Man Siu (PhD)