CREAF Sala de Graus II. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Barcelona
Spain
Contact e-mail: 
t.rosas@creaf.uab.cat
Event link: 
Link to access the online session.

CREAF Talk with Marc Macias Fauria - "Life beyond the ecological plot: conducting landscape ecology in the Arctic tundra"

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

TITLE: Life beyond the ecological plot: conducting landscape ecology in the Arctic tundra.

DATE: Wednesday, 14 th December 2022.

TIME & FORMAT: form 12 to 1pm CET - In-person and online. 

Seminars will combine in-person and online formats (CREAF, Sala Graus II, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain) but in all cases, talks will be always streamed (not recorded), so they can be followed online. 

HOW TO CONNECT: direct link to Marc Macias Fauria's conference.

SUMMARY OF THE WORKSHOP: 

Experimental ecology is based on plots. Ideally, these are well replicated, and consist at least of treatment(s) and control(s). From these, causal inference is made about the responses of ecological systems to selected variables. In the Arctic, classic ecological experiments use of open-top chambers to study the influence of warming on tundra vegetation, or exclosures to assess the impact of herbivory. However, these plots invariably occur on landscapes, and their position within these landscapes, which influences the plots’ overall characteristics and dynamics, is not always considered. Importantly, their representativity within the larger landscape is seldom quantified. This hampers our ability to robustly infer the ecological processes found to operate on plots at landscape scales. Causal inference is difficult to do when we try to analyse ecological processes at larger scales. In this talk, I will present some of the research at our lab employing remote sensing imagery to infer the influence of climate and herbivory on tundra vegetation over a range of scales – from centimetres to regional. I will present examples from tundra greening in Svalbard and herbivory pressure in north-Western Siberia.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Marc Macias-Fauria is a Professor at the School of Geography & the Environment, University of Oxford (United Kingdom). He is an ecologist who focuses on cold environments and his research is mostly directed at understanding the coupling of physical and biological systems (biogeosciences). He employs long-term ecological records, remote sensing data and modelling to understand ecological and biogeographic processes as they are constrained by the physical environment.


He gained a degree in Biology at the University of Barcelona, an MSc at the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Calgary, and a PhD at the Department of Geology (now Department of Geosciences & Geography), University of Helsinki.

Organized by: 
CREAF Severo