Università Roma Tre

The course aims to provide the theoretical and practical foundations of community ecology and macroecology.
- The student will learn the characteristics of animal and plant communities and the methods to analyze their structure. Techniques to quantitatively analyze the relationships between organisms belonging to the same community will be illustrated. Some null models will be proposed to conduct community simulation analyzes, the criteria for choosing the model and the sampling techniques most suitable for the groups analyzed.
- The study of communities and macroecology will be organized in different modules.
(i) Co-occurrence: the co-occurrence module allows to test non-random patterns of species co-occurrence in a presence-absence matrix;
(ii) Macroecology: the study of the division between species of physical space and ecological resources. Macroecological studies consist in the analysis of traits at the species level, such as body size, geographical area and average abundance, measured at large spatial scales;
(iii) Niche overlap: The study of niche overlap has a long history in community ecology. Simple theories of similarity limitation and ecological trait displacement predict that interspecific competition leads to a reduction in the niche overlap of competing species. Testing this idea with empirical data leads to three questions:
1) what aspects of the niche should be measured?
2) how can the niche overlap between pairs of species be quantified?
3) what niche overlap would you expect in the absence of competition?
(iv) Overlap of body dimensions: this module allows to test unusual patterns in the body dimensions of coexisting species and to compare these patterns with those that might be expected in a random assemblage not structured by interspecific interactions;
(v) Community diversity: Species diversity is a central subject of study in both basic and applied community ecology. Two main issues will be addressed in the study of species diversity. The first is how we can quantify the diversity of an assembly and the second is how we can statistically compare the diversity of two different assemblies;
(vi) Functional Groups or Guilds: Groups of species within a community that share common resources are considered guilds. This module will allow you to incorporate the guild structure into community analyzes.
- Through simulations in the laboratory and in the field, the student will learn the dynamics that determine the organization and structure of some selected communities.
- Interactive computer programs for the analysis of null models in community ecology will be used to test community models with experimental and non-experimental data.
Monte Carlo randomizations will be illustrated as an analytical method to compare real communities with "pseudo-communities" created using different algorithms.
The broad applicability of null models in ecology will be illustrated

Mittelbach, G. G., & McGill, B. J. (2019). Community ecology. Oxford University Press.
Morin, P. J. (2009). Community ecology. John Wiley & Sons.