Scale - A Unifying Tool for Synthesizing Biodiversity Change - Event Details

Scale - A Unifying Tool for Synthesizing Biodiversity Change

Wednesday, October 8, 2025, 9:00am – 10:00am

Location: Wentworth Hall 1 or on Zoom

A research seminar presentation from Jon Chase, from the German Center for integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv)

From the speaker:

Some of the most important questions in biodiversity studies remain among the most controversial. Are species distributions structured by environmental filtering and species interactions, or do random processes dominate? Amidst a global extinction crisis, how is local biodiversity changing? These and many other questions have driven debate in ecology for decades. Over the past 20 years, I have developed approaches and perspectives aimed at synthesizing these views through the lens of scale. A few key moments from my work on Big Island pervade my perspective and the analytical pipelines we have been building. Often by “accident”.

Our studies in Volcanoes National Park showed scale-dependent responses of understory plant diversity to the invasive nitrogen-fixing *Morella faya* and sent me down a 15-year rabbit hole to develop pipelines that can explicitly deal with this scale-dependent change through time and space. Our analyses of Big Island forest plots forced us to consider sampling effort and biases more specifically, as the data here were orders of magnitude higher than those from other islands. This made me realize that even methods like rarefaction and extrapolation are subject to hidden bias.

In this talk, I will discuss how this perspective of scale and sampling have pervaded my research program and the desire to find ways to quantify change. As a culmination of this work, I have a project funded by the European Research Council that will allow us to resurvey some of the forest plots across the islands and apply new tools to identify changes and the influence of potential interventions. With the new perspective and analyses that we are doing, I will show several case studies, both locally and globally, where we can synthesize answers to seemingly disparate results with explicit consideration of scale.

For more information, contact: canale@hawaii.edu (808) 932-7571

Tags: TCBES iDiv conservation Morella faya scale biodiversity Jon Chase study design sampling