Join us on Wednesday, September 25, at 4 pm UTC for the Funk Biogeography Seminar given by Sally Keith.
Talk Title: “Macrobehaviour: Behavioural Variation Across Space, Time and Taxa “
Integrating behavioural ecology and macroecology can provide fundamental new insight into both fields, with particular relevance for understanding ecological responses to rapid environmental change. Here, I outline the new field of Macrobehaviour using empirical examples from coral reefs. Macrobehaviour offers a spectrum of involvement where researchers can draw on as little or as much as they wish from the less familiar field, ultimately reaching questions that would not be asked without the explicit consideration of both disciplines. This can lead us towards new fundamental insights that have the potential to be relevant for conservation action, making it imperative that we coordinate efforts and share knowledge to push these frontiers forward as fast as possible. The field remains wide open with a plethora of unanswered and even unasked questions. We urgently need to assemble a diverse collaborative community to coalesce existing efforts in this space and tackle new questions within this research agenda.
Sally is a Senior Lecturer at the Lancaster Environment Centre and Environment Theme Lead for the Data Science Institute at Lancaster University. Her team coalesces around the new field of macrobehaviour – aiming to understand the links between animal behaviour, species coexistence and large-scale patterns in diversity and distributions. Sally’s work aims to advance ecological concepts and evidence in a way that is applicable across biomes and taxa, primarily using coral reefs as a hyperdiverse model system. Coral reefs are one of the most threatened ecosystems in the world, so the mission to understand, and predict, how ecological patterns and processes respond to environmental change provides a key context to Sally’s research.