The case for the preservation of ecosystems and these services is manifestly clear, but the essential challenge of how to do it depends on our knowledge of how macroscopic properties develop from, and feed back upon, diverse assemblages of biotic and abiotic elements. At the levels of ecosystems, as well as the biosphere as a whole, homeostatic processes regulate climate, and maintain the physical and chemical environment that sustains our life-support systems. This proposal seeks to understand what mechanisms, at the level of the interactions between organisms and their environments, sustain those processes, The existence of macroscopic properties at scales of ocean basins and forested regions is relevant both for basic questions on how biocomplexity emerges above the level of organisms and species, and for applied questions about sustainability and management of ecological systems. The approach will combine empirical and theoretical work to attempt to answer these questions, and to provide the scientific basis to aid in our management of the biosphere. For their populations to persist in such a landscape, trees must disperse their seeds from one island to the next.
Many trees use the wind to disperse their seeds.
If the upward velocity of the wind is greater than the rate of fall of the seed, the seed can go up rather than down. It may even get caught in a large updraft, such as happens where warm air rises, or where winds are deflected by a hill, a forest edge, or a large building. Such updrafts can take a seed high into the atmosphere, where it encounters faster winds. Or the updraft itself can move for miles, as it does in a thunderstorm, before letting the seed settle to ground. This project is a collaboration between biologists and atmospheric scientists to determine how often seeds go into these long-distance modes of dispersal.