Syllabus
1. Macroecological patterns: frequency distributions of species abundances, range sizes, and body sizes, Rapoport´s rule and Bergmann´s rule, energy equivalence rule, correlates of species´ abundances and range sizes, abundance-range size relationship, core and satellite species, generalists and specialists, structure of species´ ranges, fractals in species distribution.
2. Fundamentals of spatial ecology: metapopulation dynamics, classical metapopulations and the importance of unoccupied localities, rescue effect, nonlinear dynamics and multiple equilibria, effects of patch area and isolation, incidence functions, source-sink dynamics, habitat fragmentation and evolution of dispersal abilities, interspecific differences in dispersal rates, species range dynamics.
3. Community species richness: local diversity and its correlates, the problem of species coexistence, role of competition, productivity, disturbances, spatial isolation and the size of species pool, problem of community saturation, importance of spatial scale, species-area relationship, role of spatial distribution of individuals.
4. Biodiversity from the macroecological point of view: regional biodiversity as a result of speciation-extinction dynamics, factors affecting speciations and extinctions, role of population sizes, the species-energy relationship, latitudinal biodiversity gradient and theories explaining high species richness of the tropics, role of environmental stability and temperature.
5. Global biodiversity and its evolution: dynamics of global biodiversity, stability vs. exponential increase, mass extinctions and their effect, recoveries and cyclicity, ecology of adaptive radiation, relative importance of sympatric and allopatric speciation, ecological diversification, key innovation and species selection, macroevolutionary trends, current biodiversity changes.
6. Metabolic theory of ecology or the theory of (almost) everything: allometric relationships between body size, metabolic rate, life expectancy, population growth, and other life-history characteristics, temperature effect on the rates of biological processes including evolution and ecological succession, power-laws in energy consumption and population growth, scaling as a new and efficient methodical tool.
7. The unified neutral of biodiversity and biogeography: theory of island biogeography and its generalization, Hubbell´s community drift and the dynamics of tropical forest, ecology of metacommunities and random processes responsible for many macroecological patterns.
8. The nature of spatiotemporal variability of populations and communities: internal and external causes of population fluctuations, kinds of variability, deterministic chaos, 1/f spectra of environmental variation, Taylor´s law, contemporary changes in populations, communities and species distributions in light of our knowledge of the evolutionary history of the earth.
Annotation
This course is concerned with ecological patterns and processes apparent on large spatial, temporal and organizational scales. These include statistical regularities concerning large species assemblages, the distribution and dynamics of biodiversity on the earth as well as spatial dynamics of populations and communities.
Current attepts to synthetize macroecology and biodiversity knowledge, especially the metabolic theory of ecology, and Hubbell´s neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography, are explained as well.