Nature's Blueprint for Resilience: Tracking the Organization of Biodiversity in aChanging World 

Co-Leads: Annie Meeder (University of Colorado Boulder), Dr. Katharine Suding (University of Colorado Boulder)

Climate change and human disturbance are rapidly transforming plant communities. Yet, we still struggle to recognize when and how ecological communities are reorganizing. This working group will pair the development of statistical approaches that detect these transformations by studying the networks of species interactions with analyses of global time series data. Instead of looking only at which plants are present or how much ground they cover, we focus on the web of connections that keep ecosystems functioning--and how these connections shift under increasing stress. Around the world, scientists have been collecting detailed records of plant communities for decades, but these rich datasets have not been used to understand the relationships among species. By applying newly-developed methods to some of the most influential estimates of global biodiversity and distributed global change experiments in policy and science, , we will ask: does the internal organization of biodiversity influence how a system responds to environmental pressures?