Van Savage (University of California, Los Angeles)
Abstract. I will present work that links mechanistic, mathematical models with big-data approaches to address fundamental questions in ecology and physiology. On the more ecological side, I will discuss how vital rates of species respond to temperature and how these responses might be shaped via intrinsic physiology, extrinsic environment, and evolution. Building on this I will present progress on how species interactions depend on mismatches in thermal responses, for instance between consumers and resources, as well as other abiotic factors. To explore the prevalence of types of mismatches, I present results from a database (Biotraits) that represents a large diversity of interaction types, species, and habitats. On the more physiological side, I will describe new software for automatically measuring the dimensions, geometry, and topology of blood vessels from three-dimensional images (e.g., CT and MRI), leading to much faster collection of larger amounts of data than was previously possible. I describe the identification of new patterns for the asymmetry and self similarity of vascular branching, attempts to develop new models for the structure and dynamics of vascular networks, and analyses to explore whether constraints in real systems exist at the level of the whole network or of individual branching nodes.