Assembly of ungulate communities as an outcome of interspecific interactions over ecological and evolutionary time frames

The relative importance of factors influencing the assembly of local species communities is a key question in ecology. The distribution of any individual species is impacted by a range of environmental "abiotic" variables, such as temperature and precipitation, but also by its interactions with surrounding species, which may be either competitive or facilitative.

Furthermore, stochastic factors, such as extinction, can lead to variation between communities of species even under similar environmental conditions. In this project, I will use recently developed methods in joint species distribution modelling to investigate the role of these factors in community assembly in a species-rich and ecologically diverse group of vertebrates, i.e., the ungulates, with a focus on the varied ungulate communities in Africa.

In particular, I will identify patterns of interspecific competition and facilitation within this group, as well as how they vary at different spatial scales. As the project progresses, I will use the phylogenetic comparative method to identify convergent evolution of ecological traits that may be relevant to the assembly of ungulate communities, with the ultimate aim of synthesising the above approaches to form a conceptual model of the ecology and evolution of ungulate communities.

Looking forward, this model could be used to predict the impact of climate or other environmental change on ungulate communities in Africa, as well as impacts resulting from changes in interspecific interactions due to local species extinctions or range shifts.

When species go locally extinct, it often has wider repercussions at the community level due interspecific interactions. Recent advances in multi-species distribution modelling present exciting opportunities to pinpoint patterns in interspecific competition and facilitation within ecological guilds. A deeper understanding of the principles underpinning these interactions can in turn be obtained by using the comparative approach to identify cases of convergent evolution between species and the sequence of evolutionary events.

Ungulates are a particularly well-suited model system for statistical analysis because of their species richness and ecological and morphological diversity. This project plans to take a macroecological approach to investigate the ecological and evolutionary drivers shaping the structure of ungulate communities. The plan is to analyse data on species distributions, ecological and morphological traits, human land-use and phylogenetic history using Joint Species Distribution Modelling (JSDM) and comparative methods.

Such models can be used to explore consequences of ongoing environmental changes, such as overexploitation and climatic shifts, and thereby identify concerns for biodiversity conservation and best options for threat mitigation.