Research

Research projects

Quantifying stage-dependent competition and its impact on stochastic community dynaimcs

2024 - 2025

Do plant interactions depend on the actor & recipient’s life stage?
What impact does stage-dependence have on stochastic community dynaimcs?

Given ontogenetic niche shift, it is expected that the strength and nature of biotic interactions will depend on the interacting organisms’ life stage. Despite theoretical work suggesting that stage-dependent interactions could e.g. affect community stability & diversity (de Roos, 2021), it remains to be explored:

  1. Whether biotic interactions are stage-dependent in empirical communities
  2. How altering stage-dependent interaction effects on specific vital rates could impact stochastic community dynamics.

In my master’s reserach project, I investigated these two questions through a combination of statistical analysis on long-term demographic data from an alpine herbaceous plant community and simulation approaches using a two-species stage-structured competition model.

For each of my two research questions, I found that:

  1. Biotic interactions, and therefore stage dependence, was not statistically significant in the empirical community
  2. In the present simulation, little variation in the stage structure of populations lead to minimal impact of stage dependence on stochastic community dynamics.

Overall, these results suggest that quantifying stage-specific biotic interactions may not be necessary for accurate projection of stochastic community dynamics. This work is currently under publication.

Conceptual diagram of master's research

Publications

2024 Lee, Y. J., Sosef, M., Lucas, E., Ung, V., Gill, K., & Nicolson, N. (2024). Automated trait extraction from unstructured species descriptions for species ID: A pilot study using a large language model. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.13691936
2023 Gascoigne, S. J. L., Rolph, S., Sankey, D., Nidadavolu, N., Stell Pičman, A. S., Hernández, C. M., Philpott, M. E. R., Salam, A., Bernard, C., Fenollosa, E., Lee, Y. J., McLean, J., Hetti Achchige Perera, S., Spacey, O. G., Kajin, M., Vinton, A. C., Archer, C. R., Burns, J. H., Buss, D. L., … Salguero‐Gómez, R. (2023). A standard protocol to report discrete stage‐structured demographic information. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 14(8), 2065–2083. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.14164

Presentations

2024

Lee, Y. J., Christina, H., Ray, C. A., Blonder, B. W., & Salguero-Gómez, R. (2024, December 12). Modelling the impact of stage-dependent competition on plant community dynamics [In-person poster presentation]. British Ecological Society Annual Meeting, Liverpool, UK.

Lee, Y. J., Hernández, C., Ray, C. A., Blonder, B. W., & Salguero-Gómez, R. (2024, November 13). Pick on someone your own size? Using plant demography to understand competition & coexistence [In-person workshop presentation]. Tangled Bank Workshop, St Andrews Botanic Garden, St Andrews, UK.

Lee, Y. J., Hernández, C., & Salguero-Gómez, R. (2024, July 31). Modelling the impact of stage-dependence on two-species competitive dynamics [Online conference presentation]. Evolutionary Demography Society 9th annual meeting, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico.