Achievements in the iCCB programme in 2016

Our grand goal for the next three years is to bring to fruition some of our most impactful products, including a high impact perspectives paper on “Managing for a Changing Planet” and a book on methodologies associated with the ecometric approach. We plan to work toward securing institutional support for the iCCB mission in continuing to advance the research in trait-based approaches to conservation, as well as work towards planning a larger global change initiative under IUBS.

iCCB’s goals for 2016 were to publish collaborative high impact papers on the ongoing research, to start planning for the ecometrics book, and to organize a training workshop and hold at least one steering committee meeting.  We published 10 papers, including one in PNAS and one in Science. We also have engaged Cambridge University Press in discussions about an Ecometrics book that synthesizes iCCB’s work on functional traits as a common currency for scaling data from paleontology, ecology, and climate change biology.  A training workshop will be held in March 6-8 2017 in Nairobi, Kenya.

Publications

Dietl GP, Durham SR, Smith JA, Tweitmann A (2016): Mollusk assemblages as records of past and present ecological status. Frontiers in Marine Science 3:169. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2016.00169.

Fritz SA, Eronen JT, Schnitzler J, Hof C, Janis CM, Mulch A, Böhning-Gaese K, Graham C (2016): Twenty-million-year relationship between mammalian diversity and primary productivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 39, 10908-10913. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1602145113

Lawing AM, Eronen JT, Blois JL, Graham C, Polly PD (2016): Community Functional Trait Composition and the Effects of Non-Ecological Processes. Ecography, 40: 651–663. DOI: 10.1111/ecog.01986

Polly PD, CT Stayton, ER Dumont, SE Pierce, EJ Rayfield, K Angielczyk (2016): Combining geometric morphometrics and finite element analysis with evolutionary modeling: towards a synthesis. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, e1111225: 1-29.  doi: 10.1080/02724634.2016.1111225

Polly PD, JT Eronen, AM Lawing, J Schnitzler (2016): Processes of ecometric patterning: modelling functional traits, environments, and clade dynamics in deep time. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 118: 39-63. doi: 10.1111/bij.12716

Conferences and Workshops

Steering Committee meeting in in Berlin November 2016. We also held bi-weekly Skype meetings from August onwards for organizing the training workshop.

We held a subgroup research meeting on paleo-occupancy models in College Station, TX, USA, in March 2016. We also held monthly skype calls with this subgroup.