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Workshop 4: Spatial Ecology (March 13-17, 2006)

Organizers: Lou Gross, Claudia Neuhauser, Chris Cosner, and Mark Kot

Central questions in ecology that directly impinge on applications involve an understanding of spatial aspects of natural systems. While much of classical population and community ecology made assumptions about spatial homogeneity of systems, a large body of theory has developed over the past several decades that provide both key results and general framework for taking account of spatial factors as they affect population structure, community composition, and landscape-level structure. Some of the most critical questions that affect our ability to project the future trends of natural systems, and particularly how human actions impact these systems, must take account of spatial factors. This workshop will provide an entree to a variety of questions of ecological interest that rely upon interesting mathematics, and lead to problems that have had, as yet, relatively little mathematical analysis. The intent of the workshop is to provide an overview of some of the areas of spatial ecology that lead to interesting mathematics.

The themes of the workshop are framed at different levels of organization:

Population Level:

• How do underlying spatial heterogeneities affect population dynamics?
• How much of the observed spatial structure in populations is due to biotic versus abiotic factors?

Community Level:

• How do underlying spatial heterogeneities affect community dynamics?
• How much of spatial structure in communities is due to biotic versus abiotic factors?
• The above questions are to be addressed both within and between trophic levels.
• How do spatial aspects of systems affect disease dynamics?

Landscape Level:

• How do the spatial aspects of ecological systems affect natural resource management issues?
• How do social choice criteria interface with ecological spatial dynamics for systems in which there is the potential of human control?
• Can we manage natural systems, e.g, under what circumstances can we expect to be successful in determining the impact of human actions given uncertainties about our models and the stochasticity inherent in natural systems driven by abiotic factors?