Networks of Invasion: Empirical Evidence and Case Studies

Dave Bohan is an agricultural ecologist with an interest in predator-prey regulation interactions. Dave uses a model system of a carabid beetle predator and two agriculturally important prey; slugs and weed seeds. He has shown that carabids find and consume slug prey, within fields, and that this leads to regulation of slug populations and interesting spatial ‘waves’ in slug and carabid density. The carabids also intercept weed seeds shed by weed plants before they enter the soil, and thus carabids can regulate the long-term store of seeds in the seedbank on national scales. What is interesting about this system is that it contains two important regulation ecosystem services delivered by one group of service providers, the carabids. This system therefore integrates, in miniature, many of the problems of interaction between services.Dave has most recently begun to work with networks. He developed, with colleagues, a learning methodology to build networks from sample date. This has produced the largest, replicated network in agriculture. One of his particular interests is how behaviours and dynamics at the species level, as studied using the carabid-slug-weed system, build across species and their interactions to the dynamics of networks at the ecosystem level.

Dr Alex Dumbrell works at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Essex, UK.

François Massol is a researcher at the CNRS in the team “Evolution & Ecology of the unit “Evolution, Ecology and Paleontology at the University of Lille. He graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique (2002) and then obtained a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Montpellier (2008). After a post-doc at the University of Texas, he became a permanent researcher at the CNRS in Montpellier (2012) and then Lille (2014). His research covers the study of spatial dynamics of interspecific interactions and of diversification at intra- and inter-specific levels, mostly from a theoretical viewpoint. More generally, he is interested in evolutionary ecology questions pertaining to species interaction networks, spatially structured ecological systems, and the diversity and stability of these systems. He also regularly participates in interdisciplinary projects with researchers from mathematics, computer science, physics and social sciences, in particular on questions related to modeling and statistically analyzing contact and interaction networks.