IISER MOHALI

Abstract: Ecologists study relationships among environmental and biological variables tounderstand the effect of ongoing global changes on population, community, or ecosystemlevels across space and time. However, standard approaches to studying suchrelationships, mostly based on correlation and regression, provide limited information.With the increasing availability of ecological data, it is now possible to explore suchcomplex relationships with new quantitative tools. I would like to introduce the usefulnessof “copula” statistics for ecologists - can we learn something new about the dependencepatterns among ecological variables beyond the usual correlation approach? With a fewexamples, I will explain my past research, i.e., how to detect such dependence patterns,especially at the extreme values (or tails), the probable mechanisms behind them, andwhy one should care about such patterns. Extending this concept, my current researchfocuses on a mechanistic understanding of how community stability, diversity, andinterspecific response change over time. In the future, my research group will focus onunderstanding the mechanisms behind spatiotemporal patterns in the context of climaticextremes and anthropogenic stressors - especially when multiple drivers actsimultaneously. I feel this interdisciplinary research direction, spanning from ecology toenvironmental science, is very apt for the near future to understand and predict globalchange across ecological organizations. \n\nMeeting ID: 910 3637 2666\nPasscode: 062939\n