Upscaling dynamic eco-evolutionary models from local communities to metacommunities and biogeographic scales

Two key question in the iDiv research area Biodiversity and Complexity are “which processes drive the emergence of biodiversity patterns across spatial scales from local communities over metacommunities to biomes”, and “how does evolutionary diversification influence the broad-scale assembly and composition of biomes”? One approach to tackle these questions is to use dynamic modelling. However, using the same model (e.g., an individual-based model) to describe biodiversity patterns from local to metacommunity and even larger spatial and/or evolutionary timescales is computationally impossible. This causes the problem of how to transfer essential information across spatial and temporal scales, from smaller to larger scales, a process generally known as upscaling.
We are a group of iDiv reserachers involved in a new flexpool project (Disentangling eco-evolutionary dynamics across temporal and spatial scales) that face multiple spatial and temporal upscaling problems. The workshop objectives are to (i) bring together iDiv researchers interested in upscaling, to (ii) provide an overview on different upscaling techniques, and to (iii) develop concrete ideas of how to accomplish upscaling with an eco-evolutionary (1) spatial perspective from individuals to communities, metacommunities and finally to biogeographic scales; and (2) a temporal perspective from a few generations, to mesoscale to macroevolutionary time.
We will propose a hierarchical and modular approach where the model at the more detailed scale will be used to parameterize a “meta-model” operating at the next scale that will be enriched in a subsequent step with processes becoming relevant at the largerscale.

Workshop material and resources
http://www.thorsten-wiegand.de/Upscaling_iDivConf_Material.htm