BIOMES: Ben R. Lee, Assistant Professor of Forest Ecology, East Tennessee State University, presents "Climate change effects on biotic interactions in temperate forests"

About the Seminar:
Climate change is projected to continue to have strong and primarily negative effects on the performance and stability of temperate plant communities. Many of these effects are direct and will affect individual plants and plant populations by altering ecophysiological processes and demographic rates. For example, increasing temperatures have been shown to increase plant respirative demand and so warmer growing seasons are projected to reduce overall carbon budgets. However, many other negative climate change effects act indirectly by altering biotic interactions between plants and other organisms within a community, and these changes can have consequences for plant outcomes comparable to direct physiological effects. One of the main ways in which climate change is expected to alter biotic interactions is through changes in the timing of peak activity of previously-interacting species.

In this talk, I will focus on how changes in plant phenology – the relative timing of repeated life history events such as flowering, fruit set, leaf-out, and senescence – determine how understory plants like wildflowers and tree seedlings interact with other members of temperate forest communities. I will primarily cover topics related to plant-plant and plant-herbivore interactions and especially how climate change could cause phenological mismatches between species-pairs or functional groups. Throughout the talk, we will keep an eye toward how climate change is projected to alter biotic interactions and what these changes could mean for community stability, resilience, and ecosystem services in a warming world.

About the Series:
Over the last fourteen years, the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) has hosted this weekly seminar series. The school's flagship forum is designed to bring cutting-edge research and impactful work to the community.

BIOMES stands for 'Bridging Issues & Optimizing Methods in Environmental Studies"

The series is a community-sourced and student-led effort to bring different perspectives to YSE's main stage.

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