Speaker
Description
There is a pressing need for a quantitative understanding of how biodiversity reacts in space and time to strong anthropogenic and global warming pressures, and for innovative large-scale ecological conservation strategies integrating the strongly-coupled, collective (many-species), multi-scale character (in space and time) of the problem at hand. A prerequisite for this however is to gain some basic explicit mechanistic understanding of the spatio-temporal dynamical complexity of many-species communities and ecosystems at a fundamental and general process-oriented level. I will introduce a long-term research effort that I have been trying to initiate on this theme over the last two years, drawing directly from my experience with astrophysical fluid stability and turbulent spatio temporal dynamics. I will notably describe my work to turn a state-of-the-art astrophysical high-performance-computing fluid dynamics code into a new useful tool for the deterministic modelling of spatio-temporal dynamics in ecology at the community level. I will present a few preliminary first results pertaining to either marine/freshwater or terrestrial ecosystems, and discuss possible future work and perspectives.