Ecological Integration
Eco-complexity and Adaptation: Toward an Integrative Understanding of Ecosystems
Fields
Research
Eco-complexity and Adaptation: Toward an Integrative Understanding of Ecosystems
The ecosystem is extremely large and complex. A number of diverse organisms, and various non-living components, interact with each other through complicated dynamics to generate the different organizational levels of population, community, and ecosystem. Furthermore, living organisms, the essential components of ecosystem, are not static, but their morphology, behaviors, and interactions continuously change over time driven by evolutionary processes.
Many fundamental questions remain to be answered: How and why are organisms so diverse? What are the roles of evolutionary and ecological processes in the emergence and persistence of ecological systems? What keeps the ecosystem functional in nature? How can we cope with the “balance of nature”?
In our laboratory, multiple approaches are used to understand ecological systems, including observations or experiments in the field or laboratory, data analysis using mathematical or statistical tools, and conceptual modeling.
Our interests encompass a breadth of different areas in basic and applied ecology, such as (1) understanding the structure and dynamics of ecosystems, (2) establishing a data-driven ecology model based on large data sets (e.g. environmental DNA (eDNA) data, ecological databases), (3) understanding the evolution of plant reproductive strategies (floral sexual allocation, coevolution of flower visitors, and seed production) and (4) developing a theoretical framework for forecasting and controlling ecological dynamics.
URLs | http://hostgk3.biology.tohoku.ac.jp/ |
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