Subject Area

Community ecology of microorganisms is an attractive and growing field due to the need of a holistic understanding of ecosystem processes and functioning. The study of fungal and other microbial communities is challenged by the difficulties in defining individual and species concepts. This course will summarize the most recent advances and experimental approaches to the study of community ecology of microbes in general and fungi in particular. Hence, the course targets PhD students working on community assembly of microorganisms.

Scientific content

The course focuses in the different processes that have the capacity of affecting community assembly of fungi. Talks by leading scientists in the area will include the importance of the spatial scale the nature of ecological processes, i.e. deterministic vs. stochastic processes. We will supply a series of key readings so the students participate in discussions. Finally, during the course a series of practical sessions will exemplify different approaches for the study of the community assembly rules and to allow the students to test them with their own data.

Content

•  Community assembly rules and ecological processes, a general view.

•  The study of the ecology in the fungal kingdom, from species to communities.

•  Deterministic versus stochastic processes in community assembly.

•  Scale dependency of stochastic processes: drift and dispersal.

•  Generation of random communities from null models for comparison of beta diversity patterns.

•  Environmental filtering as a determinant of fungal communities.

•  Trait-based approaches for the study of fungal community assembly.

•  Hierarchical Modelling of Species Communities (HMSC) as a new framework for the study of community assembly.

Basic knowledge of R-based packages (vegan) recommended. Before the course there will be some preparation in reading relevant scientific papers and installing software and data.

After the course the participants are expected to be able to thoroughly analyze their own datasets and think critically on published and own data and data analysis.

Guest lecture 1

Associate Professor Tancredi Caruso

Queen´s University Belfast

https://pure.qub.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/tancredi-caruso(b856caeb-0d7c-4fd8-8680-49cbc8821380).html

Guest lecture 2

Associate Professor Erik Verbruggen

University of Antwerp

https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/staff/erik-verbruggen/

Guest lecture 3

Professor Otso Ovaskainen

https://tuhat.helsinki.fi/portal/en/persons/otso-ovaskainen(1db616b7-b1b7-42d8-9ff6-af08221bc82f).html

Guest lecture 4

Postdoc Nerea Abrego

https://tuhat.helsinki.fi/portal/en/persons/nerea-abrego(1a10b8bf-e7bb-4420-a7a9-944c3deeaf31).html

Teachers UCPH SCIENCE:

Professor Søren Rosendahl, soerenr@bio.ku.dk

Professor Jacob Weiner, jw@plen.ku.dk

Assoc Professor Jacob Heilmann-Clausen, jheilman-clausen@snm.ku.dk

Postdoc Camilla M. R. Pereira, camilla.marciel@bio.ku.dk

Postdoc Álvaro López-García, alvaro.lopez.garcia@bio.ku.dk