|
Kyle Edwards Graduate Student in Population Biology University of California - Davis kedwards[a]ucdavis.edu |
|
|
Research Interests I can be interested in almost anything that's complicated or strange, but my current expertise is in community ecology. For my dissertation I am studying mechanisms of species coexistence. I think ecologists have accumulated a wealth of feasible answers to the question, "How do so many species coexist?", but we have very little knowledge of which mechanisms operate in any particular community. I am using a shotgun marriage of observational data, experiments, and modeling to get at this question for a speciose community of sessile marine animals. Current Projects |
Mechanisms of coexistence in fouling communities The humble and colorful creatures that live on floating docks and pilings pose a well-known quandary for ecologists: how do so many species coexist when one resource (space) seems to limit them all? A number of established mechanisms could apply to this kind of system, and I am testing for colonization-competition trade-offs, a storage effect generated by recruitment fluctuation, intransitivities in overgrowth ability, and the role of facilitation between competitors. |
|
|
A new kind of rock-paper-scissors competition in space-limited communities (in collaboration with Sebastian Schreiber) 
It is reasonable to expect that competitive ability at a particular place and time is hierarchical or transitive, i.e. if A beats B and B beats C, then A beats C. The alternative is a rock-paper-scissors dynamic, or intransitive competition, where A beats B, B beats C, but C beats A. While studying mathematical models of competition for space, we have found a new mechanism that allows coexistence via intransitivity. This mechanism depends upon species having differential abilities to colonize free space, overtake occupied space, and resist being overtaken once established. Benthic marine organisms are known to differ according to these spatial "strategies", so we expect this mechanism could be empirically significant. Forays into the wild west of ecological statistics The complexity of ecological data is motivating us to learn new statistical methods, methods with arcane and intruiging names like multilevel modeling, information criteria, and Markov chain Monte Carlo. I have been collaborating with a group including former PBGGer Louie Yang and my labmate Jarrett Byrnes to apply some of these newer methods to a meta-analysis (broadly speaking) of resource pulse events. The future of such statistical applications should be interesting, as we have needed to delve into the statistical literature to address issues like poorly defined degrees of freedom and information criteria for models with random effects. | |
|
Publications Edwards, K. F., C. A. Pfister, and K. L. Van Alstyne. 2006. Nitrogen content in the brown alga Fucus gardneri and its relation to light, herbivory and wave exposure. Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology 336:99-109. [-pdf-] [-link-] Cowan, A. T., G. R. Bowman, K. F. Edwards, J. J. Emerson, and A. P. Turkewitz. 2005. Genetic, Genomic, and Functional Analysis of the Granule Lattice Proteins in Tetrahymena Secretory Granules. Mol. Biol. Cell 16:4046-4060.[-link-] | |