Project Abstract
How do populations change over time, and do changes in one species correspond to changes in other species? These questions are at the heart of our project. In this project, over the course of one year we will be tracking changes in variation at several scales: (1) genetic variation in a seagrass population, (2) population dynamics and genetic diversity in a fish that relies on seagrass throughout its life, and (3) the diversity of the community of animals living in seagrass. We will use state-of-the-art analytical approaches to compare diversity across these scales and investigate corresponding changes over time.
This project will reveal how variation within species interacts with variation among species, which will provide the scientific community with unprecedented information about biodiversity. Our project will be one of the first applications of these analytical methods to compare diversity across scales, and will be the first to integrate genetics, population dynamics, and ecological communities ove
