Welcome to StrateGo!

Welcome to the StrateGo network!

StrateGo is a network of field ecologists and macro-ecologists interested in making robust population predictions for species invasions and local extinctions in the light of stochastic environments and tangible threats like human actions and climate change.

Large datasets that would allow for the inference of demographics from individual-level key traits (i.e. functional traits) exist (e.g. TRY, Kew Gardens, BIEN, D3, etc). However, the consequent species-specific geographic overlap between functional trait databases and demographic databases (below) is rather limited. In many cases, the sites where the demography and the functional traits of a given species are examined are hundreds of kilometres away. Due to microhabitat, abiotic and biotic spatial heterogeneity, inferring properties of a population such as its growth rate, degree of resilience, or its underlying governing demographic processes (elasticities of population growth rate to survival, growth or reproduction), although possible (Figure 1), has presented some correlations of relatively low predictive power

Figure 1. In a publication by Adler, Salguero-Gómez et al. (PNAS 2014), we showed for the first time that key functional traits such as seed mass, wood density, specific leave area and leave Nitrogen content may be used to predict the relative importance of demographic processes of plants worldwide. However, the adjusted R2 of these models, that is its predictive power, were rather low (0.08-0.30). This is likely due to the fact that functional trait data and demographic data come from faraway locations for most species.

The solution that StrateGo presents to build more robust predictive demographic models is to bridge the geographic gap between functional ecology and population ecology by collecting functional traits (e.g. seed mass, specific leave area, metabolic rate, photosynthetic rate, body mass, etc.) of species at the same locations where demographic data for thousands of species worldwide have already been collected in the following repositories:

• The COMPADRE Plant Matrix Database
• The COMADRE Animal Matrix Database
• The PADRINO Plant IPM Database
• The MADRINA Animal IPM Database
• AnAge
• DATLife
• BIDDABA
• MALDDABA
• PanTheria
• Amniote

Figure 2. GPS coordinates by taxonomic Kingdom and major ecoregion around the globe for which demographic information exist for the COMPADRE and COMADRE databases.

The protocol for functional trait data collection is currently under development, and a grant to seed the initial foundation of StrateGo is also under review. Functional trait data collection is planned for late 2017. Researchers interested in joining the network can contact the StrateGo leader, Dr Roberto Salguero-Gómez (r.salguero AT sheffield.ac.uk)