Functional Microbiomes

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.