Statement of research interests Etienne Laliberté May 22, 2009
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Current and Past Research
1.1
Effects of land use change on communities and ecosystems
Understanding the impacts of human activities on communities and ecosystems is my current main research interest. I’m particularly interested in how intensification of multi-species agroecosystems impacts 1. functional diversity 2. ecosystem processes 3. ecosystem service provision 4. food web structure My current PhD research is done is the high-country New Zealand tussock grasslands, which have a long legacy of extensive pastoralism but are being increasingly developed (e.g. top-dressing, over-sowing, irrigation). I have also recently conducted a meta-analysis on the impacts of land use intensification on the response diversity and functional redundancy of plant communities across 18 land-use intensity gradients from nine countries and five biomes (Laliberté et al., 2009b). I also recently explored how habitat modification in tropical Ecuador affects the spatial and temporal variability of parasitoidhost food webs (Laliberté and Tylianakis, 2009).
1.2
Measuring functional diversity
I am very interested in developing ways to measure multiple facets of functional diversity. My main contribution in this field has been to propose a distancebased framework to measure functional diversity from multiple traits (Laliberté and Legendre, 2009). I have recently developed the FD R package (http://cran.rproject.org/web/packages/FD) to allow ecologists to easily measure functional diversity from trait and species abundances data.
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1.3
Beta diversity
Exploring the spatial patterns of plant communities and its drivers is an additional (but somewhat peripheral) interest. My main contributions in this domain have been to clarify and develop multivariate methods for analyzing spatial patterns and quantifying the importance of niche and other spatial processes on beta diversity (Laliberté, 2008; Laliberté et al., 2009a).
1.4
Restoration ecology
I have also been interested in developing/testing practical methods for restoring ecosystems. My Msc thesis explored ways of optimizing hardwood reforestation in abandoned agricultural fields/pastures of southern Québec (Laliberté et al., 2008a,b).
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Future Research Goals Land use change, ecosystem service providers, and trade-offs among ecosystem services
I wish to focus my future research on exploring the inherent trade-offs among ecosystem services as land use intensifies. I am particularly interested in understanding the relationship between land use change, ecosystem providers (and their associated traits) and the provision ecosystem services. Of particular interest is the response diversity (i.e. diversity of responses to environmental change within groups of species that contribute similarly to an ecosystem function or service) of ecosystem providers (e.g. nitrogen-fixers, palatable grasses, pollinators), in order to quantify resilience of ecosystem services to future environmental change. In addition, I would like to establish experimental communities varying in response diversity (while controlling for species richness) in order to test whether greater response diversity of ecosystem providers actually confers resilience of particular ecosystem services to external disturbances.
2.2
Functional diversity of food web interactions
Empirical ecology has made enormous recent progress in evaluating the impacts of human activities on food web structure, but empirical food webs are still largely taxonomic constructs. A next frontier is to define interactions not by the taxonomic identities of the species they involve, but instead by their functional traits. I wish to develop this area of research in the future, thus merging my interests in functional diversity and food web ecology.
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References Laliberté, E. (2008). Analyzing or explaining beta diversity? comment. Ecology, 89(11):3232–3237. Laliberté, E., Bouchard, A., and Cogliastro, A. (2008a). Optimizing hardwood reforestation in old-fields: the effects of treeshelters and environmental factors on tree growth and physiology. Restoration Ecology, 16(2):270–280. Laliberté, E., Cogliastro, A., and Bouchard, A. (2008b). Spatiotemporal patterns in seedling emergence and early growth of two oak species direct-seeded on abandoned pastureland. Annals of Forest Science, 65:407. Laliberté, E. and Legendre, P. (2009). A distance-based framework for measuring functional diversity from multiple traits. Ecology, in press. Laliberté, E., Paquette, A., Legendre, P., and Bouchard, A. (2009a). Assessing the scale-specific importance of niches and other spatial processes on beta diversity: a case study from a temperate forest. Oecologia, 159(2):377–388. Laliberté, E. and Tylianakis, J. M. (2009). Land use intensification homogenises food web structure in space and time. submitted. Laliberté, E., Wells, J., DeClerck, F., Metcalfe, D. J., Catterall, C. P., Queiroz, C., Aubin, I., Bonser, S. P., Ding, Y., Fraterrigo, J. M., McNamara, S., Morgan, J. W., Sanchez-Merlos, D., Vesk, P. A., and Mayfield, M. M. (2009b). Land use intensification reduces response diversity in plant communities. submitted.
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