NCEAS Working Groups
Spatial and temporal community dynamics: Sharing data to answer questions
Project Description
General ecological principles can, by definition, only be derived from studies that span multiple taxa, geographic areas, and time periods. Such a broad research agenda implies data-sharing among many researchers from diverse geographic regions. Many of the technological barriers to data-sharing have been and are being addressed but there still exist many sociological obstacles to data-sharing because researchers are often, understandably, reluctant to share hard-won datasets. We propose to identify the key barriers to data-sharing and provide incentives to overcome these barriers. Once an effective data-sharing model is developed we will build a "pilot" database using multi-species, site and time period datasets contributed by the working group participants. This database will be used to answer fundamental ecological questions such as; Are more diverse communities more stable? Is the diversity-stability relationship scale, taxon or habitat specific? Are natural communities regulated primarily by biotic or abiotic factors? Does the answer to that question depend on the scale, taxa and/or habitats being studies? Do spatial and temporal variability change in some predictable way with scale? This working group is intended to be a pilot project for a large-scale ¿consortium¿ of ecologists sharing multi-species, site, and time period datasets to derive general ecological principles.

Principal Investigator(s)
Jeff Houlahan, David J. Currie, C. Scott Findlay
Project Dates
Start: February 16, 2004
End: June 14, 2006
completed
Participants
- James H. Brown
- University of New Mexico
- Karl Cottenie
- University of Guelph
- Graeme Cumming
- University of Florida
- David J. Currie
- University of Ottawa
- S. K. Morgan Ernest
- Utah State University
- C. Scott Findlay
- University of Ottawa
- Samuel D. Fuhlendorf
- Oklahoma State University
- Ursula Gaedke
- Universitat Potsdam
- Jeff Houlahan
- University of New Brunswick, Saint John
- Pierre Legendre
- Université de Montréal
- John Magnuson
- University of Wisconsin, Madison
- Brian McArdle
- University of Auckland
- Esteban Muldavin
- University of New Mexico
- David Noble
- British Trust for Ornithology
- Peter Raimondi
- University of California, Santa Cruz
- Carmen Rojo
- Universitat de Valencia
- Roly Russell
- Oregon State University
- Richard D. Stevens
- Louisiana State University
- David Tilman
- University of Minnesota
- Theodore Willis
- University of Toronto
- Ian Woiwod
- Rothamsted Research
- Steve Wondzell
- Pacific Northwest Research Station
Products
-
Journal Article / 2007
Compensatory dynamics are rare in natural ecological communities