Description:

Speaker:  Bo Zhang (Oklahoma State University)

Title: Movement Dynamics: Responses and Consequences in Changing Environments

Zoom Link: https://illinois.zoom.us/j/82616248519?pwd=CAR0v0aaIpTnIVwxJDa59wFvusobot.1

Abstract:  Anthropogenic actions and climate change are fragmenting the environment and putting more emphasis on the role of organism movement to favorable habitats, which sustains population survivorship and biodiversity. The main focus of the presentation is to incorporate movement into modeling to develop more accurate and realistic ecological dynamics models. For instance, habitat loss and fragmentation, when taken together, can negatively impact biodiversity. However, clarification is required to determine the relative importance of the latter, due to the challenges of conducting field studies that distinguish the relative independent impacts of habitat loss and fragmentation. Moreover, species with different locomotion rates respond differently to fragmentation, complicating any direct comparison across differing taxa and landscape patterns. To overcome these challenges, we combined mechanistic mathematical modeling and laboratory experiments to disentangle the impacts of habitat fragmentation and locomotion. We applied the Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) experimental system to engineer mutants with different movement behaviors and performed competition experiments to identify consequences of movement strategies in spatially and temporally heterogeneous/fragmentation environments. Our theoretical and empirical results found that species with a relatively low motility rate maintained a moderate growth rate and high population abundance in fragmented habitat. Alternatively, fragmentation harmed fast-moving populations through a decrease in the populations’ growth rate by creating a mismatch between the population distribution and the resource distribution. Our findings shed new light on the role of locomotion in determining the effects of habitat fragmentation.