CHRISTOPHER P. CATANO, Ph.D.
Why does the importance of biodiversity for producing & stabilizing ecosystem functions vary across scales?
Integrating remote-sensing & large-scale experiments to scaling of B-EF in restored grasslands
In collaboration with the Basso digital agronomy lab at the Kellogg Biological Station, I am integrating multi-spectral remote sensing, AI, and and large-scale experiments to understand how stochasticity and niche-partitioning during plant community assembly alters the scaling of biodiversity-productivity relationships in ecosystem restorations.
Bird β-diversity increases the the stability of biomass from local to regional scales across North America
Key finding: Using a continental-scale analysis of 1657 North American breeding-bird communities spanning 20-years and 35 ecoregions, I show local species diversity and β-diversity influence two components of regional stability: local stability (biomass stability within sites) and spatial asynchrony (asynchronous fluctuations in biomass among sites). In contrast to small-scale experiments, I found spatial asynchrony explained 3x more variation in regional stability than did local stability. Spatial asynchrony increased with bird β-diversity and climate heterogeneity (temperature and precipitation), while local stability increased with species diversity. This study reveals that both local biodiversity loss and biotic homogenization can destabilize ecosystems processes at large, biogeographic scales.