Readings for each lecture are linked, and should open in an Adobe window or download to your local computer. Lecture power points will be linked as well, but not necessarily before class. The recored lectures will be posted after class for members who can't make the live webcast.

Meetings W=week

W1A (Jan 23) ELSA - Global environmental change, what are plant community responses? Intro lecture on exciting topics in plant functional ecology. Why we need functional groups (community ecology is too complicated). Application to restoration/conservation. Introduce website, get students to sign on and put info up.

• McGill - TREE
• Diaz and Cabido (2001) – TREE
• Elsa's lecture in PDF format
• Recording of lecture 1A and explanation of how to view
  

W1B EVERYBODY - Intro lecture about NCEAS/informatics. What is the DGS, good data management/stewardship, synthesis etc. (Local, send out power point to everyone) - Using Morpho (short lecture plus “lab” where students enter a dataset)

• Stephanie's NCEAS/Data/Ecoinformatics presentation
  
• Michener - Ecological Applications
• Jones et al Annual Reviews 2006
• TREE paper with Riechman as co-author
  
• Download Morpho
  

W2A (Jan 30) STEVE – Why we need functional groups revisited. How to make functional groups, what traits are important – which traits are correlated? Categorical versus continuous traits. Are there natural groups?

• Wright et al 2004 Nature
• Wright et al 2005 Global ecology and biogeography
  
• Keddy -2002 journal of vegetation science
• Recording of Steve's lecture See Shaun's instructions for viewing and note that for some reason the pages are not turning, so follow along with the PDF
  
• PDF of Steve's presentation slides
  

W2B DAN (Feb1?) - Learning R – Dan Bunker’s R tutorial. Regression, plotting.   

• see # for Dan's tutorial
  
• An Introduction to R by Venables and Smith.  An excellent intro and reference.
• Jonathan Baron's R-Help Search Site -  This is the first place to go to find out how to do something beyond the basics.  You can search all the online package and function documentation, as well as the R-Help archives.
  
• Paul Johnson's Rtips - Great tip sheet for all the basics.
  
• Additional R resources at http://www.r-project.org/ , see 'books', 'manuals', for:
• Statistics: An Introduction using R by Michael J. Crawley - A nice intro by a famous ecologist.
• Mixed effects models in S and S-plus by Pinheiro and Bates - This is now outdated due to Bates' new lme4 package, but the theory is still good.
  

W3A (Feb 6) SCOTT - Niche versus neutral? Deterministic versus stochastic dynamics – disentangling the two aspects of Hubbell’s theory. Plasticity/microevolutionary change/species turnover as responses to environmental changes? Community reordering, dominance? Space for time substitution. Are traits a good way to predict how communities are assembled? Functional/phylogenetic/species diversity – how to measure? What are the properties of the measures? When do they diverge, when do they agree? Niche space – how is it divided up? Niche breadth.

• Scott's lecture slides
• Scott's recorded lecture
  
• Maron et al. 2007
• Smith et al. (in prep)
• Gilbert & Lechowicz PNAS 2004

W3B Nathan's tutorial, put it into R, data discovery, scatterplots, means, standard deviations etc.     

•     Nathan's R tutorial
  

W4A (Feb 13) DAVID- Assembly rules, e.g. limiting similarity during community assembly, old versus new models, over/under dispersion. Phylogenetic methods.

• Recording of David's lecture
• Davids lecture slides (PDF)
  
• Weiher & Keddy
• Cornwell Ecology 2006
  
• Cavender-Bares et al 2006
  

W4B – DAVID/DAN null models, limiting similarity, ecological filters, VEGAN calculate multiple metrics of functional & species diversity (Material covered by tutorial)

• R exercise 3 by Nathan and David
  
• Petchey & Gaston, Ecology Letters 2006
  
• Peet Ann Rev 1974
• Petchy & Gaston review, FD 2002
• Rao 1982 Theoretical Population Biology
• Stubbs & Wilson
• Chao et al 2004 Ecology Letters
  

W5A (Feb 20) KATIE - Ecological convergence versus divergence – priority/threshold effects.

• Katie's lecture slides
  
• Katie's recoded lecture and how to view
  
• Grime  2007 JVS
• Chase 2003 Ecol Letters
• Fukami et al 2005 Ecol Letters

W5B – KATIE(Stan) Community similarity, distance metrics, mantel tests, “bootstrapping”

• Lab 5b 

W6A (Feb 27) TIFFANY - Ecosystem context. Response versus effect traits e.g., regeneration traits can be important to predicting response to environmental change, but not the effect on ecosystem function.

• Katie's recorded lecture
  
• Katie's lecture in PDF format
  
• Naeem & Wright 2003
• Lavoral & Garnier 2002 Functional Ecology
• Suding manuscript 2008

Structure:

• Two hour time block, twice per week – watch one hour lecture, one hour of discussion or activity Wed 10:45 - 12:00 Pacific Time, with a second meeting scheduled separately at each institution for computing lab.
  
• 4 day Capstone Synthesis meeting - Arrive in SB in time to work Thursday March 27^th, depart Tuesday the evening of the 31st or 1st.  2 students plus 1 faculty leader from each institution will attend

Other potential topics to cover if there is time/interest

• Multivariate stats –open-source/R techniques

• Trait datasets that exist.
• Give everyone the same dataset and question but not method, how many answers do you get?