We are planning on submitting an Organized Oral Session Proposal for the 2017 ESA meeting in Portland, on the topic of “Consequences of individual variation in dispersal for recruitment, populations, and communities”. A short description is included below. We have several speakers confirmed, however we are looking for a few more people to round out the session. If your research falls under this topic and you are planning on attending the 2017 ESA meeting, please contact us! In addition to an exciting and interesting set of talks, we also plan to invite all of the participants to write a short perspectives piece supporting the idea that we need a better understanding of the variation in dispersal and related traits for predicting responses to climate change.
Each talk will be 20 minutes long, and there is no financial compensation for the invited speakers. If you have any questions or to indicate your interest, please email Rebecca Snell ([email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>) BEFORE September 13. On behalf of the organizing committee, Noelle Beckman, Utah State University Evan Fricke, Iowa State University Bette Loiselle, University of Florida Rebecca Snell, Ohio University A short description of the session: Dispersal is a poorly understood phenomenon of great conservation importance, since it is both affected by global change and affects the ability of organisms to respond to global change. For plants or other sessile organisms, movement of individual propagules provides the single opportunity in their life cycle to change geographic locations. Dispersal has an important impact on fitness, species distributions, and patterns of biodiversity by mediating population- and community-level dynamics. However, models that predict extinction risk of species, range shifts, and biodiversity loss rarely incorporate realistic dispersal mechanisms and tend to rely on the mean value of parameters due to the challenges of incorporating processes occurring over multiple scales and in heterogeneous environments. By focusing on the mean population value, variation among individuals or the complex spatial and temporal dynamics in which these interactions take place are ignored. Improving our understanding about the importance of variability in dispersal among individuals will increase our ability to predict the relative role of dispersal for populations and communities, and improve conservation and management strategies. However, the sources, magnitude, and outcomes of intraspecific variation in dispersal are poorly characterized, limiting our understanding of the role of dispersal in mediating the dynamics of communities and their response to global change. The objectives of this organized oral session are to examine the importance of individual variation in dispersal to fitness, populations, and communities from a variety of perspectives in order to advance our ability to model outcomes of dispersal and manage systems under changing conditions.
