Description:

Guest speaker, Katie Suding from the University of Colorado Boulder, will discuss topics about their research: "In this era of rapid environmental change, we are increasingly being faced with two challenges: how to conserve native rare species and how to control the dominance of exotic invaders. Research aimed at these challenges often looks to species traits to better understand what allows a plant to invade or stay rare. I will go back to classic niche-based arguments about determinants of abundance, and suggest that we are missing a fundamental piece of this puzzle applied to management: dynamics when rare can be quite different than dynamics when a species is abundant. These frequency dependent effects can come into play to affect resilience following disturbance, restoration trajectories, and response to environmental stochasticity. I will talk about several projects from my research group where we find that frequency dependency influences whether a species is at high extinction risk when rare, whether an invader can capitalize on a changing environment, and whether our interventions affect restoration success."