Workshop, Dec 8-10, 2010
Co-organizers: Pat Kirch, Bruce Baldwin, Dan Rabosky, George Roderick
From Dec 8-10, 2010, we held a workshop for the purpose of identifying common parameters that underlie biodiversity dynamics on islands. The general structure was designed to integrate information across the following areas: 1) Patterns of biodiversity (role of island age & isolation); (2) Colonization (source & predictability); (3) Species/ area relationships. (4) Rate & pattern of species accumulation; (5) Equilibrium numbers of species; (6) Early burst of evolutionary divergence; (7) Human-mediated extinction patterns; (8) Intersection of evolutionary & ecological processes. To achieve our overall goal of understanding of biodiversity dynamics on islands, at the workshop we plan: (1) a synthesis that gives a general predictive model of how biodiversity, and associated interactions, change over evolutionary (and ecological) time. And (2) integration across approaches to understand biodiversity in both natural and human-modified landscapes (coupling biological and anthropological data), in order to show where we're at, and to identify the major "gaps" in our current understanding.