A general approach to Species-Abundance relationships in a
context of global change, reef fish species as a model

CESAB (Center for Synthesis and Analysis on Biodiversity)
French Foundation for Research on Biodiversity (FRB) (2011-13)

See also:

PI: Kulbicki, Michel – IRD, France

 
Species-abundance relationships are central to ecology. Their modeling has been the source of numerous hypotheses and theories, but so far no general approach has been proposed to analyze how these relationships vary according to a set of factors ranging from local to regional, nor how they vary according over life-history traits or functions. Taking coral reef fish assemblages as models we propose to investigate how these relationships may vary according to local to regional factors combined with a range of life-history traits, at various spatial scales and according to different connectivity and environmental change scenarios. This work will gather information from 1000’s of sites distributed across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans, covering several thousand species and hundreds of functional groups. Worldwide coral decline, a major concern for the future of coral reefs, is linked to global changes, and the present modeling could bring answers to patterns of the evolution of reef fish assemblages next to such coral decline. This modeling could have far wider applications as species-abundance relationships share many commonalities across a wide range of ecosystems. This work could also attract attention to the huge potential of reef fish assemblage data to tackle a large panel of hypotheses in theoretical ecology.