Working Groups:

Biogeography of microorganisms: from taxonomy to traits
Brendan Bohannon, Jessica Green, Ian Wright

Microorganisms represent the vast majority of Earth's biodiversity and they play a crucial role in nearly every process of environmental importance, yet only recently have we begun to understand the distribution of microbial life. The field of microbial biogeography has grown enormously in the past 5 years, in large part due to the influence of a previous NCEAS working group. The study of microbial biogeography initially adopted a taxonomic approach, focusing on sequence signatures to identify groups of microorganisms, and using these signatures to reveal patterning in microbial biodiversity. These studies revealed classic biogeographical patterns such as the species-area relationship and isolation by distance. However the field of biogeography is changing. There is a resurging interest in understanding patterns in the distribution of not only taxa, but also the traits those taxa possess. Patterns in trait variation can be used to understand complex phenomena, including why organisms live where they do, how many taxa can coexist in a place, and how they will respond to environmental change. Technological advances such as environmental genomics place microbial ecology in a unique position to move trait-based biogeography forward. The proposed working group will bring together microbiologists who are gathering microbial biodiversity and trait data with general ecologists who are developing theory to explain and predict patterns of trait variation. The group will identify important traits in microbial biodiversity data, develop predictions regarding the distribution of such traits, and document patterns in trait-based microbial biogeography. The products of the proposed working group will not only benefit the general studies of ecology, microbiology and biogeography. They will also contribute to our understanding of the response of ecological systems to environmental change and will provide important foundational knowledge that can guide microbial bioprospecting, the search for biomolecules of pharmaceutical, agricultural and industrial importance.

Pyrogeography - fire's place in earth system science
David Bowman and Jennifer Balch

It is time to rethink the place of fire on Earth. Megafires are currently overwhelming human control, despite huge budgets and mature fire-fighting technologies. There is mounting evidence that, beyond immediate destruction of life and property, landscape fires have long-term effects on global carbon stocks, biodiversity, climate, world economies, and human health. Despite fire's pervasive influence in many disciplines, there is no uniting theory or paradigm concerning the role of biomass burning in Earth science. Moreover, fire has not been satisfactorily considered by global change policy and ecosystem management. We, therefore, propose a thought experiment addressing (i) whether fire would evolve where carbon-based life is present, (ii) how it would evolve, and (iii) how humans, their cultures, and fire may have coevolved. We will combine knowledge about biomass burning across fields to develop an integrative paradigm of 'pyrogeography' that addresses these fundamental questions. This synthetic exercise will inform and coordinate participant's research to derive global products that highlight how and where shifting fire regimes will have consequences for human health, property, and ecosystem services - including global terrestrial carbon stocks. Our outputs will be a succinct review paper, an edited volume, and a concise book that collectively will: (i) provide a conceptual framework to account for the variation of fire types (intensity, frequency, and extent) in space, time, and amongst cultures, (ii) set out working hypotheses that will guide future work, and (iii) identify major omissions of fire's important role in Earth science and management. These outputs are a prerequisite for adaptation to the apparent recent intensification of fireclimate-vegetation feedbacks, which have been exacerbated by climate change, rapid land cover transformation, and exotic species introductions that challenge the evolutionary integrity of entire biomes. 

The role of niche conservatism in producing biodiversity gradients
Howard Cornell, Susan Harrison and Christy McCain

Species diversity at broad spatial scales increases most strongly with productivity (terrestrial realm) and temperature (marine realm). The reason for such global-scale trends is still unknown. Ecological mechanisms operate locally and therefore appear inadequate to explain why these patterns are strongest at the largest geographic scales. Our goal is to test a novel evolutionary/historical hypothesis - the climatic "niche-conservatism" hypothesis - which postulates that more species inhabit more productive or warmer environments because most higher taxa originated in such environments, and evolutionary constraints limit occupancy of colder or more arid regions. This hypothesis yields the testable prediction that ancestral climate state accounts for the strength of productivity- or temperature-richness relationships among taxa. We will test this using newly developed phylogenetic methods on both terrestrial and marine data. We will also quantify the timescales over which niche conservatism operates, analyze historical climate-richness data, and investigate possible mechanisms for niche conservatism.

Integrated history and future of people on Earth (IHOPE): Building a community data base and testing the resilience - sustainability hypothesis across scales
Robert Costanza, Lisa Graumlich, and Sander van der Leeuw

Understanding the reasons for the emergence, sustainability, decline, or collapse of human societies is a key prerequisite for creating a sustainable and desirable future. A central hypothesis is that the probability of societal collapse, or failure, increases with loss of resilience in social-ecological systems. The proposed working group will assemble integrated environmental and human historical data at the global scale for comparative analysis and for a few key case study areas for dynamic analysis in order to help build this understanding. We will develop criteria for integrating and analyzing disparate data across scales and disciplines. Key lessons from an ongoing project titled "Integrated Research Information System (IRIS)" using the ARCHAEOMEDES dataset from southern Europe (van der Leeuw, 1998, 2005) will be incorporated. A key component of this activity will be developing better ways to integrate and visualize data from the broad range of relevant sources (i.e. from historical narratives to ice cores) and with a broad range of spatial and temporal resolution and quality. In assembling the integrated data base the working group will also develop meta-variables and indices that can serve as proxies for environmental predictability and system resilience. We can then test the ability of various proxies of system resilience to explain sustainability or breakdown of social structures, relative to alternative hypotheses. A range of modeling approaches will be applied to the problem.

When are matrix models useful for management? An empirical test across plant populations
Elizabeth Crone, Eric Menges, Martha Ellis

In the past three decades, the role of matrix-based demographic models in plant conservation has steadily increased. However, the reliability of these methods remains hotly debated. Most tests of model performance have relied on strict conditions for either the datasets being tested or the criteria used to judge accuracy of the results. This leads to a potential disconnect between the variety of ways in which models are used in practice and the limited set of conditions where their performance has been evaluated. Our working group brings together a group of ecologists who have worked with these models in applied settings. We will review how models have actually been used in the recent past and discuss what predictions we expect these models to usefully provide. We will then use our demographic data from long-term studies to evaluate how well demographic models actually predict the dynamics of perennial plant populations. We will also address whether increasing methodological complexity (e.g. density dependence, integral projection modeling) improves reliability. The convergence of our group occurs at a moment when sufficient time and data have accumulated to test the predictions of demographic models at relevant time scales for management, and takes advantage of NCEAS capacities to bring together diverse groups and archive key data. Thus, this working group provides a timely opportunity to reevaluate what has become an exceptionally important tool in conservation and management.

Envisioning a sustainable global seafood market and restored marine ecosystems
Larry Crowder, Martin Smith

Ecologists, conservationists, and economists agree that many of the world's wild-capture fisheries are overfished, overcapitalized, and continue to decline. At the same time, global demand for fish protein is growing rapidly. Aquaculture provides an increasing share of the world's edible fish protein, but there are potentially adverse environmental effects of large-scale aquaculture production. Wild-capture fisheries and aquaculture together comprise the global seafood market. Though the deleterious impacts of fisheries and aquaculture on marine ecosystems have been widely studied, few studies have focused on the mechanisms by which the global seafood trade contributes to declines in marine ecosystems and how this trade might be altered to support restoration of marine ecosystems. Also, scientists from different disciplines mainly study the constituent parts of seafood production in isolation without an overarching vision of what an ecologically and economically sustainable seafood system would look like. This is the void in scholarship we seek to fill with a team of marine ecologists, conservation practitioners, natural resource economists, and an anthropologist. We seek to explore three overarching questions: 1) Can we envision a global seafood system that is sustainable and does not degrade marine ecosystems? 2) Are there features of the global seafood trade that, if enhanced, could facilitate bottom-up sustainability of individual fisheries and aquaculture operations? 3) Are there top-down policy instruments or international agreements that would nudge the global seafood trade towards more sustainable practices? This study is timely and of vital importance, and we believe we have assembled an ideal team to carry it out. By linking knowledge about how the global seafood trade works with knowledge about the ecological impacts of fisheries and aquaculture operations, we will identify the pressure points to shift the global seafood trade away from harming marine ecosystems and towards a sustainable seafood system.

Developing an integrated botanical information network to investigate the ecological impacts of global climate change on plant biodiversity
Brian Enquist, Richard Condit, Robert Peet, Brad Boyle and Steven Dolins

Many of the major questions in ecology span enormous geographic and temporal scales, yet much ecological knowledge is still based on observations of individual investigators conducted at single locales, often covering scales of only a few hundred square meters. Understanding ecological patterns and predicting future changes, including those caused by human impact, necessitates a holistic approach covering large spatial scales, and this will only be achieved by identifying, retrieving, and synthesizing diverse data from distributed sources: heterogeneous data from a global confederation of collaborating scientists including a broad range of disciplines. To address this pressing need, we propose to network eight of the largest databases on plant inventories in the Americas to assemble an accessible and readily analyzable database warehouse on distributions and abundances. With it, we will answer major questions of direct relevance to conservation of new world biota. In particular, how does climate and latitude influence the relative distribution and abundance of narrow and widespread plant species? While this and associated questions have been mainstays for ecology our inability to integrate data has significantly limited our ability to answer them. The proposed working group will significantly improve our ability to finally answer these questions. We will also make distribution and abundance data widely available so that further analyses, for example covering other plant taxa or particular regions, will be possible. It is also part of our plan to continue expanding our meta-database with additional inventories, collections, and plots not yet digitized, plus future field work. This data network will provide a baseline of critical data that will allow ecologists to address fundamental issues in plant ecology and global change biology.

Benchmarking ecosystem response models with experimental data from long-term CO2
Richard Norby, Yiqi Luo, Ram Oren, I.C. Prentice, and Paul Hanson

Ecosystem models have been increasingly incorporated into earth system models to predict climatic and atmospheric dynamics. However, ecosystem models themselves are far from perfect and need continued improvement. We will advance this necessary model improvement using some of the longest and most comprehensive data sets on CO2 impacts on ecosystems from field experiments. Twelve ecosystem process and land surface models, which are being used for predicting terrestrial response to atmospheric and climatic change, will be parameterized with site and weather data from the Duke University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory free-air CO2 enrichment (FACE) experiments. We will evaluate the ability of the models to reproduce the measured processes of the carbon, water, and nitrogen cycles of the experimental forest stands and their responses to elevated atmospheric CO2 concentration. Similarities and differences among the models and their components will provide guidance for improving all of the models. With the experimental data as a benchmark for model performance, the utility of the models for extrapolation to environmental change questions can be demonstrated with increased confidence. This working group will include participants who are most familiar with the experimental data, a data manager to assemble and format the data for model input, representatives from diverse modeling groups, and a neutral observer to synthesize model results. This data-model intercomparison project has the potential to provide better scientific outputs for policy making.

An interdisciplinary approach to advancing landscape genetics
Michael Rosenberg, Bryan Epperson, Andrew Storfer

Landscape genetics is the intersection of landscape ecology with population genetics. While spatial analytical methods have been applied to genetic data for three decades, advances in high-throughput collection of genetic data combined with increased availability of GIS-based landscape data have outpaced advances in statistical methods. Classical population genetic measures (e.g., Fst and Nei's D) are aspatial in nature and most often applied to allele frequencies from limited numbers of molecular markers. Today we are capable of generating hundreds of markers from distinct individuals (e.g., genome-wide SNP assays or AFLP loci). A distinct benefit of landscape genetics is that significantly more genetic variation can be explained by spatially-explicit analyses than traditional aspatial analyses. As such, landscape genetics holds great promise for ecological genetics research, such as explaining processes that affect the distribution of neutral or adaptive genetic variation, revealing cryptic barriers to dispersal, and developing conservation programs focused on landscape features that facilitate connectivity among populations. This working group will bring together landscape ecologists and spatial analysts with population geneticists to (1) examine the applicability of historic and currently used spatial tools for estimating spatial genetic structure with the various types of data generated in modern population genetics studies; (2) examine the statistical rigor of each combination of statistic and data type to test hypotheses about underlying spatial-temporal processes; (3) adapt existing and invent new methods for analyzing modern genomic data in a spatial context; and (4) develop forums for communicating with practicing ecological and evolutionary geneticists, landscape ecologists, spatial statisticians and conservation biologists.

Postdoctoral Associates:

Carol Adair
Do microbes matter? Using global data to test implicit versus explicit representation of microbial activity in litter decomposition models

Despite the major contribution of decomposition to global carbon and nitrogen cycles, it remains poorly understood. This uncertainty is reflected in the diversity of approaches used to depict decomposition in ecosystem models and in debate regarding if, or how, microbes should be explicitly represented. I propose to compile a large-scale, long-term database of litter decomposition data, which I will use to compare two sets of decomposition models: the first varies only in how microbial activity is modeled; the second compares the best model(s) from the first set to a range of published models. Conducting a sophisticated model comparison using spatially and temporally extensive data will allow me to evaluate the relevance of explicitly incorporating microbial activity into large-scale decomposition models and compare the ability of published models to accurately describe global decomposition.

Lesley Lancaster
What community characteristics promote recent and current bio-diversification? An investigation of community-level, ecological correlates of rapid diversification in replicate, temperate angiosperm genera

Processes behind patterns of angiosperm biodiversity in temperate regions are little understood. Further, we do not know whether particular communities that currently support relatively high temperate biodiversity are the same communities that promote the evolutionary process of diversification (i.e. speciation). I propose to compare diversification rates within selected angiosperm genera that inhabit a range of temperate communities using published phylogenies and sequence data, focusing on clades in which nodes can be or have been dated. I will then map habitat and community characteristics that have been hypothesized to be general factors promoting rapid diversification. I will apply method-of-moments estimators of diversification rates (using a stochastic birth-and- death model of diversification) both within and between selected genera to look for correlations between recent rapid divergence within clades and characteristics of habitat or community type occupied by those clades. Previous studies of diversification processes have targeted particularly diverse clades or communities and then attempted to draw conclusions about which factors led to their respective high species numbers. However, my proposed method will allow for more rigorous hypothesis testing and generalization of conditions promoting diversification by starting with a phylogenetically diverse array of genera and ecological conditions within which to compare habitat characteristics and diversification rates. Furthermore, recent advances in estimating diversification rates will allow me to disentangle the relative effects of speciation vs. extinction on diversification rates. These methods have seldom been applied to diversification rates within less inclusive crown clades, which may be the most relevant for understanding the processes of speciation and conservation of habitat features or communities that are most likely to be sites of current speciation and/or extinction.

Duncan Menge
Synthesizing ecosystem development data in a theoretical framework to understand transitions from nitrogen limitation to colimitation to phosphorus limitation 

The ability of ecosystems to sequester carbon (C) and help mitigate climate change depends on which factors limit C uptake into vegetation. It is increasingly clear that nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) play critical roles in regulating C uptake, and forests tend to transition from N limitation to colimitation to P limitation as they develop from bare ground. However, at present there is no theoretical framework that determines the conditions under which each resource limits production, or when transitions between the different states should occur. At NCEAS I will build such a theoretical framework, synthesize existing data from forest chronosequences worldwide, and combine theory with data to analyze transitions between the alternate ecosystem states of limitation by N, P, or both.

Mary O'Connor
Linking physiological rates and community ecology: effects of temperature on food web dynamics and population connectivity

Fisheries productivity and population connectivity are two complex ecological
processes that are relevant to effective management of ocean resources but are very difficult to study directly. Developing a quantitative understanding of how these processes vary with environmental conditions will provide insight into the mechanisms governing each process, as well as how the processes change geographically or with climate change. I will use a general theory of metabolic responses to temperature to determine the role of temperature in driving variation in food web productivity and larval dispersal and survival in marine systems. This research will produce marine food web and larval dispersal databases, along with models, simulations and maps of how these processes are affected by ocean temperature under specific climate change scenarios. 

Simon Queenborough
Addressing a long-standing paradox: how do dioecious plant species persist?

Breeding system impacts the ecology and evolution of coexisting plant species.
Perhaps the best example of such impacts is exemplified by dioecious plant species (those with separate male and female individuals), populations of which suffer a fitness cost because of the lower number of seed-bearing stems relative to ecologically similar hermaphroditic species. To maintain per capita growth rates that are equal to their hermaphroditic counterparts, female individuals in dioecious populations must exhibit one or more fitness advantages, which might include: higher fecundity, higher rates of offspring recruitment, earlier ages of reproduction, more frequent reproduction, or higher quality offspring. The fitness advantages predicted to have evolved in dioecious species have remained elusive because of inadequate data and a failure to fully integrate phylogeny and dynamic demographic and distribution data with other species functional traits. This study will use a newly developed functional-trait database of plant reproductive traits and recently-available rigorously collected spatially-explicit plant demographic data on >6,000 species and >3,000,000 individuals to examine the associations among breeding systems, demography and functional traits in a phylogenetically informed way in order to seek evidence for fitness advantages in dioecious taxa.

Sadie Ryan
Quantifying long-term landscape vegetation dynamics in and around Kibale National Park, Uganda, to establish appropriate landscapes for zoonotic disease models 

Models of zoonotic diseases, particularly those at the spillover interface, require a certain degree of spatial information that theoretical, spatially implicit models cannot always encompass. This is often the situation for parasitic or locally contaminant infectious diseases, or location-specific reservoirs that re-infect populations. For these types of diseases, particularly those that may be the subject of vaccination programs, agent-based models incorporating explicit landscapes may provide a more appropriate framework for analyzing disease spread. However, introducing the complexity of geographically explicit landscape interactions, particularly with temporal dynamics, is irrelevant if the mechanisms and agency of disease spread within that landscape is not reducible to patterns at a scale meaningful to the model's mechanistic drivers. In this project I propose to examine a specific landscape, Kibale National Park, Uganda, in which primate parasitic disease, anthropogenic fragmentation and climate change are posited to be interacting. I am currently working on agent-based models of zoonotic diseases, particularly addressing the human-primate interface, and would like to complement this work with quantified, data-driven dynamic landscapes. This will lay the groundwork for similar approaches in other sites and scenarios, such as Ebola vaccination in gorillas (with P. Walsh, NCEAS working group) and control of SIV or respiratory disease transmission in Gombe chimpanzees (with M. Wilson and A. Pusey, Jane Goodall Institute, MN).

Jennifer Williams
Evaluating life history theory and the consequences of reproductive strategy for population fluctuations

Organisms have evolved a variety of mechanisms to maximize individual fitness in the face of environmental stochasticity that may also serve to buffer population fluctuations. Life history strategies for reproduction, including whether to produce all offspring at once (semelparity) or to spread out the reproductive effort across several bouts (iteroparity), can lead to important consequences for population persistence. While much theory predicts which strategy should be optimal for individuals, few empirical tests exist. The proposed research will use stochastic population models compiled from published and unpublished data of species that exhibit facultative semelparity to address two unresolved issues in evolutionary biology and population ecology: when can iteroparity buffer population fluctuations and do life history predictions match the observed strategy with realized levels of stochasticity? This project will help to refine current life history theory on semelparity and iteroparity, and will clarify the connection between selection pressures on individuals and the consequences for population persistence. Understanding a mechanism that can buffer population fluctuations will also contribute to predictions of which species may be more vulnerable to increased climate variability. Support from NCEAS will be crucial for gathering the volume of data necessary to conduct this research, and collaborations with resident and visiting ecologists will enhance not only this project but initiate new research.

Sabbatical Fellows:

William Fagan
Dendritic landscapes: Exploring connectivity and biodiversity in an alternative geometry

As an NCEAS Sabbatical Fellow, I will explore the implications of dendritic (branching) geometries, such as those found in river networks and elsewhere in nature, for ecological complexity through the development of theoretical models.

Andre de Roos
Population and community ecology of ontogenetic development and growth

Current ecological theory is to a large extent based on population dynamic models that ignore individual variation within species, in particular the variation that stems from the ontogenetic development that virtually all species go through during life history. The theoretical understanding about the consequences of ontogenetic development for the dynamics and structure of ecological communities has in recent years progressed to a state that a synthesizing book of this theory is urgent, possible and timely. I propose to devote my sabbatical period to writing this synthesis and want to spend this time specifically at NCEAS to take full advantage of the Center's unique data resources for testing the theoretical predictions against as many experimental and empirical data sets as are available.

John Sabo
Dams, river networks and the distribution of native and non‐native freshwater fauna in the United States

Dams are ubiquitous in riverscapes and implicated in ‘biotic homogenization' of river ecosystems. Biotic homogenization (BH) is defined as a reduction in biogeographic variation in species composition and caused by extinction of native fauna and invasion of non‐indigenous species. The goal of my proposed Sabbatical Fellow research is to define a quantitative approach to conservation biogeography of rivers rooted in drainage network theory. I will use seven georeferenced databases to quantify the effects of river network structure, the quantity and size of dams and nature of dam placement within the context of river networks on flow‐related changes in river biota across the US. In contrast to previous work on this topic I will tackle this question using a structural equation modeling approach that accounts for spatially autocorrelated errors in these datasets while simultaneously modeling complex cause‐effect relationships. This will allow me to quantify the cumulative (serial) effects of multiple dams in drainage networks and the interactive effects of dam and network properties on BH. This work should provide general rules of thumb about where in watersheds dam removal and experimental release strategies would work best.

Ted Schuur
Permafrost and the global carbon cycle: A research and education synthesis towards understanding terrestrial feedbacks to climate change

At present, increasing greenhouse gases responsible for climate change are largely a result of human activities. However, climate change may alter the natural cycling of carbon (C) in ecosystems far from direct human influence. Because of the size and nature of the permafrost C pool, decomposition of previously frozen, old organic C is one of the most likely positive feedbacks from terrestrial ecosystems to climate change. Sustained transfers of C to the atmosphere that could cause a significant positive feedback from permafrost to climate change must come from ‘old' C, which forms the bulk of the permafrost C pool. Radiocarbon measurements of ecosystem respiration losses provide the definitive proof of old C mobilization in natural ecosystems undergoing change. Two synthesis activities relating to this topic will be carried out as a sabbatical fellow at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. The first activity consists of compiling and analyzing soil incubation data from the published literature to understand the relative climate forcing effect of methane and carbon dioxide released from decomposing permafrost C. The second activity is the organization and writing of an isotope textbook focused on the use radiocarbon in ecology and earth system science. This activity will synthesize 5 years of materials developed for a short course taught at the Keck Carbon Cycle Accelerator Mass Spectrometer facility at UC Irvine. Together these research and education synthesis activities will advance understanding of terrestrial ecosystem feedbacks to climate change.

Kerry Woods
Slow systems and complex data-sets: Multi-decade permanent plots permit address of recalcitrant questions about late-successional forests

Long-standing (and often conflicting) hypotheses about processes in late-successional forest communities remain effectively untested because existing data-sets are inadequate for analysis of very slow processes. Usual approaches are of limited power because they employ assumption-laden indirect methods or data-sets of low precision and resolution. Large, multi-decade, spatially explicit data from systems of permanent plots in old-growth forests in Michigan afford the potential for rigorous address of a range of important but recalcitrant questions. Are community and population processes stabilizing and convergent, or non-equilibrial and historically contingent? Is diversity maintained by equilibrial or non-equilibrial processes? How do frequency and scale of different types of disturbance interact with population dynamics and  interactions? Are tree growth and biomass accumulation related to diversity? How do spatial and temporal scale and resolution affect answers to these questions? The data-set, while uniquely appropriate for assessing these questions, is also very complex - irregular in structure and complexly stratified in time and space - posing daunting methodological challenges. This project has two general goals that will make use of the distinctive resources and mission of NCEAS. First, I hope to collaborate with NCEAS staff and guests in developing and applying models and analytic approaches appropriate to these research questions and commensurate with the properties of the data set (I particularly hope to establish ongoing collaborations). Second, I hope to make this data-set available to the larger community of researchers by archiving it in the NCEAS data repository and developing structures for continual updating as new layers of data are acquired.

Distributed Graduate Seminars

Developing best practices for testing landscape effects on gene flow
Helene Wagner, Lisette Waits

A key objective of landscape genetics is to study how landscape modification and habitat fragmentation affect organism dispersal and gene flow across the landscape. Landscape genetics requires highly interdisciplinary, yet specialized professionals, and makes intensive use of spatial analysis tools such as remote sensing, GIS software and spatial statistics that have not historically been a component of training programs for population geneticists. Even when students receive disciplinary training in several of the involved fields of landscape genetics, educational programs lack the necessary linkage and synthesis among disciplines. This linkage can only be accomplished after experts from each discipline work together to develop guiding principles for this new research area. This proposed distributed graduate seminar unites some of the most active landscape genetics groups in North America and Europe, drawing on the experience of experts both in population genetics and landscape ecology with the goal of providing an integrated overview of approaches for testing the effect of landscape pattern on dispersal and gene flow, a key topic of landscape genetics.

Each seminar will start with a video-taped lecture that introduces foundations and methods and highlights points for discussion in local seminar groups. Practical experience applying various methods to selected cases studies will be provided through a combination of computer labs, interpretation of sample output, and paper discussions. Student groups across universities will focus on a specific step in the data collection and analysis process, evaluating the consequences of different choices of methods and deriving recommendations when to use which method, with each group project leading to a scientific publication. The main goal of the synthesis meeting is to discuss how consequences of methodological choices propagate to later steps in the analysis, leading to a joint publication of best practices for testing landscape effects on gene flow.