Seeing The Tree From The Forest: Predicting The Future Of Plant Communities

[Staff]

Seeing The Tree From The Forest: Predicting The Future Of Plant Communities

ScienceDaily (Aug. 21, 2009) — The ability to envisage the future may be closer than you would think. A recent paper by Sean Hammond and Karl Niklas in the August 2009 issue of the American Journal of Botany presents an algorithm that may be used to predict the future dynamics of plant communities, an increasingly interesting area of study as significant environmental changes, such as global climate change and invasive species, are affecting current plant communities.

Seeing The Tree From The Forest: Predicting The Future Of Plant Communities
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"Remarkably, our model predicts the behavior of real plant populations, and thus suggests to us that many 'complex' ecological interactions emerge as a result of a few very 'simple' processes," commented Dr. Niklas. SERA may be very useful in predicting changes in community development and composition as environmental and climatic variability increases.