Christopher Catano

University of California, Riverside | UCR · Department of Botany and Plant Sciences

A major challenge in ecology, conservation and global-change biology is to understand why biodiversity responds differently to similar environmental changes. Contingent biodiversity responses may depend on how disturbance and dispersal interact to alter variation in community composition (β-diversity) and assembly mechanisms. However, quantitative...

Regional species diversity generally increases with primary productivity whereas local diversity–productivity relationships are highly variable. This scale-dependence of the biodiversity–productivity relationship highlights the importance of understanding the mechanisms that govern variation in species composition among local communities, which is...

Despite decades of research on the species-pool concept and the recent explosion of interest in trait-based frameworks in ecology and biogeography, surprisingly little is known about how spatial and temporal changes in species-pool functional diversity (SPFD) influence biodiversity and the processes underlying community assembly. Current trait-base...

Biodiversity often stabilizes aggregate ecosystem properties (e.g. biomass) at small spatial scales. However, the importance of species diversity within communities and variation in species composition among communities (β-diversity) for stability at larger scales remains unclear. Using a continental-scale analysis of 1657 North American breeding-b...

The species pool concept has advanced our understanding for how biodiversity is coupled at local and regional scales. However, it remains unclear how species pool size, the number of species available to disperse to a site, influences community assembly across spatial scales. We provide one of the first studies that assesses diversity across scales...

The relationship between biodiversity and stability, or its inverse, temporal variability, is multidimensional and complex. Temporal variability in aggregate properties, like total biomass or abundance, is typically lower in communities with higher species diversity (i.e., the diversity–stability relationship [DSR]). At broader spatial extents, reg...

Ecological restoration outcomes are highly variable, undermining efforts to recover biodiversity and ecosystem functions. One poorly understood source of variability is ‘year effects’—interannual variation in environmental conditions during the first year of restoration that alter successional trajectories of plant communities. There have been few...

Recovering biodiversity is a common goal of restoration, yet outcomes for animal communities are highly variable. A major reason for this variability may be that active restoration efforts typically target plant communities, with the assumption that animal communities will passively recover in turn. However, this assumption remains largely unvalida...

Relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning depend on the processes structuring community assembly. However, predicting biodiversity‐ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationships based on community assembly remains challenging because assembly outcomes are often contingent on history and the consequences of history for ecosystem functi...

The relationship between biodiversity and stability, or its inverse, temporal variability, is multidimensional and complex. Temporal variability in aggregate properties, like total biomass or abundance, is typically lower in communities with higher species diversity (i.e., the diversity-stability relationship or DSR). Recent work has shown that, at...

Despite the importance of biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationships in ecology and conservation, relatively little is known about how BEF relationships change across spatial scales. Theory predicts that change in BEF relationships with increasing spatial scale will depend on variation in species composition across space (β‐diversity),...

Ecological restoration is notoriously unpredictable because similar actions can result in different outcomes. Outcomes can also differ for species and functional components of communities depending on how restoration actions and abiotic conditions alter community assembly trajectories. Quantifying variation in community trajectories across restorat...

Restoration outcomes are notoriously unpredictable and this challenges the capacity to reliably meet goals. To harness ecological restoration's full potential, significant advances to predictive capacity must be made in restoration ecology. We outline a process for predicting restoration outcomes, based on the model of iterative forecasting. We the...

Plant-soil feedback studies attempt to understand the interplay between composition of plant and soil microbial communities. A growing body of literature suggests that plant species can coexist when they interact with a subset of the soil microbial community that impacts plant performance. Most studies focus on the microbial community in the soil r...

Background/Question/Methods A key challenge in ecology is to understand how changes in primary productivity alter spatial variation in community composition (β-diversity). Yet β-diversity often shows variable responses to productivity. Such variability could reflect shifts in the relative importance of assembly processes—dispersal, ecological drift...

In large-scale conservation decisions, scenario planning identifies key uncertainties of ecosystem function linked to ecological drivers affected by management, incorporates ecological feedbacks, and scales up to answer questions robust to alternative futures. Wetland restoration planning requires an understanding of how proposed changes in surface...

Background/Question/Methods: A key goal in ecology is to disentangle how multiple processes at different scales influence patterns of biodiversity. Variation in biodiversity can arise from local-scale niche-based processes such as competition and environmental filtering as well as from regional-scale processes such as dispersal and speciation. Howe...

Background/Question/Methods: The effects of disturbance on site-to-site variation in species composition (beta-diversity) appear to be highly contingent. Disturbance is often observed to decrease beta-diversity through convergent selection of disturbance-tolerant species, resulting in homogenization of community composition. In contrast, disturbanc...

Background/Question/Methods The possibility of thresholds and other complex, non-linear dynamical properties of ecological systems is prompting a paradigm shift in ecosystem management practices. However, not all ecosystems exhibit threshold-like behavior and the dynamics associated with directional change in environmental drivers may well be ecosy...

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Keystone species are important drivers of diversity patterns in many ecosystems. Their effects on ecological processes are fundamental to understanding community dynamics, making them attractive conservation targets for ecosystem management. However, many studies assume keystone effects are constant. By developing functional relationships of specie...

It is uncertain how climate change will impact hydrologic drivers of wildlife population dynamics in freshwater wetlands of the Florida Everglades, or how to accommodate this uncertainty in restoration decisions. Using projections of climate scenarios for the year 2060, we evaluated how several possible futures could affect wildlife populations (wa...

Change in vegetation structure alters habitat suitability for the threatened gopher tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus). An understanding of this dynamic is crucial to inform habitat and tortoise management strategies. However, it is not known how the choice of the sample grain (i.e., cell size) at which vegetation structure is measured impacts estimate...

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Background/Question/Methods Multi-scale information of habitat structure is necessary to derive ecologically relevant models of species-habitat interactions. However, it is logistically difficult to collect fine-grain information on habitat structure at broad spatial extents using only traditional field based methods. Lidar remote sensing is a powe...