Scaling Up from Individuals to Communities
The structure and dynamics of communities over time are mainly shaped by the varying demographic success of individual organisms. This success depends on interactions between individuals and their environment, which are in turn governed by the functional traits of organisms. Thus, to understand what mechanism maintain composition and diversity of communities we should study how functional traits relate to individuals performance. One of our main areas of interest is to investigate the role of the intra-specific trait variation in plant community assembly.
To achieve this, our projects analyze growth and survival patterns in conjunction with the abiotic and biotic context, integrating detailed measurements of intra-specific trait variation. These individual-level measurements provide a comprehensive understanding of the processes governing community structure and dynamics.
Some of the questions on intraspecific trait variation have been developed in El Verde Field Station in Luquillo, Puerto Rico where I have been working with seedling communities. In 2013, with my field assistant, Roxy Cruz-de-Hoyos, we published a rapid color guide for the seedling species present at El Yunque.
We are also currently developing a project across tropical dry forests in Colombia in which we are studying how functional traits effects scale up from individuals to communities.
Check out our publications on this topic!
Umaña M.N., Salgado-Negret B., Norden N., Salinas L., Garzon F. Medina S., Rodríguez-M. G., López-Camacho R., Castaño A., Cuadrados H., Franke-Ante R., Avella A., Idarraga, A., Jurado R., Nieto J., Pizano C., Torres A., García H., and Gonzalez-M R. 2023. Upscaling the effect of traits in response to drought: the relative importance of safety-efficiency and acquisitive-conservation functional axes. Ecology Letters. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.14328.
Umaña M.N., Swenson N.G., P. Marchand, Cao M., Luxiang L., and Zhang C. 2021. Relating leaf traits to seedling performance in a tropical forest: building a hierarchical functional framework. Ecology 102: e03385. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.3385.
Umaña M.N., Zipkin E., Zhang C., Cao M., Lin L., and Swenson N.G. 2018. Individual-level trait dissimilarity and negative density dependence affect growth in tropical seedlings. Journal of Ecology 106: 2446-2455. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2745.13001.
Contact
María Natalia Umaña
Assistant Professor
Ecology and EVolutionary Biology
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
3142 Biological Sciences Building