From Jan 30th to
Feb 1st 2013, the symposium on "Causes and Consequences on Organism
Dispersal" was held at Lund University hosted by BECC and CAnMove. We were
honored by a large number of motivated participants (90 people) including 9
international speakers, 8 national speakers and 15 poster presenters. They introduced
different approaches to understand, monitor and model the impact of dispersal, of
a diverse range of taxa (from microbes to fish and marsupials), in a changing
environment.
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| Some of the participants during the symposium - Group Picture (photo: Inger Ekström) |
Discussions and
talks highlighted the key role played by dispersal on the biodiversity and
distribution of organisms on Earth. Discussions took place formally in the
auditorium and continued during two dinners and a quiz on organism dispersal.
Organism dispersal
is complex and depends on different parameters. For example, it is shaped by life
history (Beth Okamura from Natural History Museum), animal personality (Julien
Cote from University Paul Sabatier), and the interaction/competition between
dispersers and native species (Wim van deer Putten from Netherland Institute of
Ecology). It varies among scales (temporal and geographical scales, Wim
Vyverman from Gent University). It also occurs during migration flight in birds
Clark Rushing (Smithsonian Institution) and may be influenced in microbes by
mass effect and/or species sorting (Eva Lindström from Uppsala University). The
dispersal of an organism is often link to the dispersal of smaller attached organisms
with important consequences on health (e.g. malaria, Staffan Bensch, Lund
University) and community diversity (e.g. propagules dispersed by waterbirds,
Andy Green, Doñana Biological Station). A theorical approach to integrate these
parameters was presented by Jörgen Ripa (Lund University).
Monitoring
dispersal is sometimes tricky and different approaches were discussed related
to the size of the organism that disperses and the habitat: the use of airborne
sampling (Jakob Löndahl from lund University), environmental DNA (Alice
Valentini from Spygen), high polymorphic genetic markers to measure gene flow
and population structure (Paul Bentzen from Dalhousie University) and the use
of next generation sequencing (Sylvie Tesson from Lund University).
Landscape plays a
crucial role on the movement of an organism (Paul Caplat from Lund University),
acting as a resistance against free dispersal (Rachael Dudaniec from University
of Queensland), and impacting the distribution, the survival and the
persistence of populations (Johan Ekroos from Lund University). Zones of
conservation and protection of some organisms are nowadays established based on
models (Per Jonsson from Gothenburg University). However, one needs to integrate
the life cycle, biology, animal personality, and the interactions with the environment
and the native species, in order to delimit ‘real’ and ‘reliable’ reserves to
save biodiversity.
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| Audience room during the symposium – Session I (photo: Giuseppe Bianco) |
Overall it was a
very informative and fun symposium, which brought together different domain of
research questions in the area of organism dispersal. We ended the symposium
with a world-cafe - a series of
discussions around a cup of coffee.
The organization
committee - Sylvie Tesson, Karin Rengefors and Katarina Hedlund - would like to
thank all of the participants of the symposium for their active discussions on
organism dispersal in a changing environment, and all delegates who helped us during
the symposium!
We will now begin
to work on Summary and Forum papers in order to share our discussion with the
scientific community, including some of the exciting researches we heard about
at the symposium and novelties and future issues we judged important to
pinpoint. Please keep in touch to discuss and read the upcoming papers…
//Sylvie Tesson
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