Qaecologists sometimes occur in trees. And occasionally they find it difficult to get out.

Species distribution models turn up in on all sorts of papers these days, from those trying to explain speciation, to those predicting the outcome of climate change. The environmental variables used in such models are often assumed to relate to physiology somehow. But typically this assumption  is implicit rather than explicit. However, there  are some notable exceptions. The mechanistic modelling practiced by Michael Kearney’s lab and others, uses measured physiological responses to predict species distributions.

QAECO researchers Laura Pollock, Will Morris and Peter Vesk offer another approach in the latest issue of Ecography. Their new approach is to link functional traits with a multi-species distribution model. The model reveals how each functional trait modifies the relationship of the species to each environmental variable. Read more here.

Related articles

• Linking functional traits and species distributions (lshirleypollock.wordpress.com)
• Multivariate musing (petervesk.wordpress.com)