Using individual based modeling to understand grassland diversity and resilience in the Anthropocene The world’s grassland systems are increasingly threatened by anthropogenic change. Susceptible to a variety of different stressors from land use intensification to climate change understanding the mechanisms driving the maintenance of these systems’ biodiversity and stability and how these mechanisms may shift under human mediated disturbance is thus critical for successfully navigating the next century. Within this dissertation I use an individual based and spatially explicit model of grassland community assembly (IBC grass) to examine several processes thought key to understanding their biodiversity and stability and how it changes under stress. In the first chapter of my thesis I examine the conditions under which intraspecific trait variation influences the diversity of simulated grassland communities. In the second and third chapters of my thesis I shift focus towards understanding how belowground herbivores influence the stability of these grassland systems to either a disturbance that results in increased stochastic ...