We are excited to host Theo Gibbs (New York University) who will present in the BeyondTheEdge Seminar series with a talk titled Do higher-order interactions promote coexistence in diverse ecological communities?
From the human microbiome to the Amazon rainforest, diverse ecological communities are widespread in nature. In the traditional approach to understanding species coexistence, ecologists assume that the interactions in a community operate only between pairs of species. However, interactions among three or more species, called higher-order interactions, may also contribute to the maintenance of biodiversity. In this talk, I will discuss some theoretical expectations for how these interactions shape community structure. Then, I will present experimental evidence that higher-order interactions structure the dynamics of annual plant communities.
Bio: Theo Gibbs is a Schmidt Science Fellow and Postdoctoral Researcher in the Center for Genomics and System Biology at New York University in the Bergelson Lab. His research combines theory and experiment to understand how diverse ecological communities stably coexist. He conducts experiments with annual plants in the field and microbial strains and, in parallel, he builds and analyzes theoretical models for how species interactions impact diverse coexistence.