Graduate Student Seminar with Lucas Graham on Community Functional Landscapes

Historically, the field of genetics has been concerned with the mapping of genotype to phenotype to individual species fitness. This has been complicated by the often nonlinear interactions between specific loci and their impact on individual fitness. However, the approach of generating and studying fitness landscapes has proven useful in exploring and understanding this problem. The main problem approached by ecology is similar to genetics: trying to understand the mapping from community composition to function, which is also often complicated by species interactions. Can functional landscapes be used successfully in ecology like in genetics? Recent experimental data suggests these seemingly complex landscapes can (sometimes) be well fit with linear regression. Understanding when and why these functional landscapes are smooth could be useful in the design of novel microbial communities with a wide range of applications. In this talk I will present my current work to better understand this phenomenon.