Winfree's webinar, “Do We Need Biodiversity for Ecosystem Services?” begins at 4:10 p.m. on Zoom at https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/93312644886.
All those interested can tune in--just click on the link, said Williams. "To access the talk, you do not need an account, but you will need to install zoom ahead of time. Use the link to join the meeting."
"Out of respect for the speaker, during the talk please keep your microphone muted, video off, and avoid using the chat feature," he added. "We will invite questions at the end."
Winfree says the goal of her research program is to understand the role of biodiversity in ecosystem services in the real world--that is, in large-scale and unmanipulated systems. We are developing a framework for thinking about this question that bridges the gap between smaller-scale experiments and the associated theory, which ecologists understand well, to the more complicated reality of nature. What is the most meaningful way to measure biodiversity in nature, and is the answer scale-dependent? Do we need to preserve biodiversity in order to maintain ecosystem services, or are only a few dominant species sufficient? What is the role of rare species in ecosystem services? Can we extend biodiversity-ecosystem function research to mutualist networks? These are some of our current questions."
As collaborators, Winfree and Williams recently published “Species Turnover Promotes the Importance of Bee Diversity for Crop Pollination at Regional Scales,” in the journal Science. They set out to answer the question: "How many wild bee species do we need to pollinate our crops?"
The answer, briefly: "Not nearly enough bees are available for crop pollination."
The UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology seminars, coordinated by community ecologist and assistant professor Rachael Vannette, are all virtual. Some have been cancelled and others postponed. See schedule.