Dispersal in bromeliad macroivertebrate communities

Dispersal, or the movement of individuals, is very important in order to maintain natural populations. However, dispersal is often difficult to study. New technological developments now allow us to infer dispersal from genetic data. We will use naturally occurring communities of insects that live in small pools of water in order to study how dispersal allows communities of several species to coexist together. In order to do this we must collect insects from these pools of water (that are present in some plants), to then sequence parts of their genomes. We expect that larger insects, higher in the trophic chain will disperse further and therefore will stabilize the community. Whereas smaller insects that use other methods of dispersal will have smaller dispersal distances. Overall this project will help us increase our understanding of dispersal in patchy habitats, which is very important for our management of fragmented forests and nature reserves.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Diane Srivastava

Student:

Laura Melissa Guzman Uribe

Partner:

Discipline:

Zoology

Sector:

University:

University of British Columbia

Program:

Globalink Research Award