Workshop 4 Description:

Workshop 4: Spatial Ecology

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 entrée 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: