Summary- Biocomplexity incubation

Summary- Biocomplexity incubation

This grant was a collaboration between me, Nick Gotelli, and Tom Miller (lead PI). We organized a group of ecologists, evolutionary biologists, mathematical modelers, and systematists to study the aquatic communities that inhabit the water-filled leaves of the pitcher plant Sarracenia purpurea. The mosquito larvae, mites, rotifers, protozoa, bacteria, and other organisms that consistently inhabit these leaves provide a unique system of "miniature" communities across much of North America. We collected data from 39 sites along the U.S. East Coast to develop broad, testable hypotheses about the complex forces that we think structure communities. The long-term goal was to develop and complete a comprehensive, widely dispersed set of field experiments and to analyze them in light of the ecological and evolutionary histories of the component species. Although the intent was to subsequently apply for a full NSF Biocomplexity award based on these data, the program was reconfigured in 2001 and no longer supports work focusing on spatial processes.