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Francesco Polazzo

@fancescopolazzo.bsky.social

PostDoc at the University of Zurich. Passionate about ecological stability, environmental change, community ecology, food web, but also climbing, mountaineering, ski touring, (gravel)biking.

12 Posts158 Follower 227 Folgt

Francesco Polazzo @fancescopolazzo.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Excited to announce our thematic session at @britishecologicalsociety.org annual meeting! @ckunze.bsky.social and I will be co-chairing the thematic session entitled “Insurance in ecosystems: exploring the role of response diversity across scales”.

Frank Pennekamp @pennekampster.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Does body size predict abundance the same way in all environments, as predicted by the Metabolic theory of Ecology? Our new study challenges this assumption. Read it here: 📄 doi.org/10.1111/ele....

Biodiversity modulates the cross‐community scaling relationship in changing environments

Organismal abundance typically declines with increasing body size, with metabolic theory predicting a universal size–abundance slope of –0.75. Using protist microcosms across gradients of species ric...

doi.org

Francesco Polazzo @fancescopolazzo.bsky.social · 10mo ago

New paper out in Ecology Letters! “The Imbalance of Nature: The Role of Species Environmental Responses for Community Stability” 📖 Read it here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... We tried to answer the question: What drives community stability in fluctuating environments?

The Imbalance of Nature: The Role of Species Environmental Responses for Community Stability

This study shows that the distribution of species' fundamental responses to environmental change, quantified by a new metric, imbalance, is a key driver of ecological stability. In a large microcosm ...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Owen Petchey @owpet.bsky.social · last yr.

AI in research, tips and tricks from the retreat of my and Frank Pennekamp's research groups. Nothing too revolutionary, but we found it useful to share. Happy to hear any of your tips and tricks! @pennekampster.bsky.social @fancescopolazzo.bsky.social thetrophiclink.org/posts/2025-0...

AI tips and tricks | TheTrophicLink

At our recent group retreat we shared AI tips and tricks: Don’t forget all the cool stuff in Google NotebookLM, including making podcasts to listen to on the train, in the gym, or while doing the lau...

thetrophiclink.org

Frank Pennekamp @pennekampster.bsky.social · last yr.

Are you interested in predator-prey interactions and movement ecology? I am looking for a PhD student to work on the project "A mechanistic theory of functional responses: zooming into movement behaviour to understand and predict predator-prey interactions" euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/342402.

PhD student in Ecology (up to 4 years)

The position is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation project “A mechanistic theory of functional responses: zooming into movement behaviour to understand and predict predator prey interacti...

euraxess.ec.europa.eu

Owen Petchey @owpet.bsky.social · last yr.

swissuniversities and Wiley are in a no-deal situation. Suggestions include to consider alternatives to Wiley, and to reconsider review activities for Wiley. Very sad---some great ecology and evolution journals are with Wiley. www.swissuniversities.ch/en/topics/op...

Wiley - swissuniversities

swissuniversities.ch

Mike Fowler @theorecol.bsky.social · last yr.

Happy to announce that JF Arnoldi (Theoretical and Experimental Ecology Station, CNRS, France) will present the next #ResponseDiversityNetwork Seminar, Wednesday 26th Feb 15.00 CET. "Linear functional ecology: Rethinking species contributions to ecosystem functions" Zoom link via rb.gy/3pf8dh

Details of the Response Diversity Network seminar, given by JF Arnoldi, including a Zoom link and Abstract:

Ecosystem functions describe processes like biomass production, respiration, or nutrient cycling, that can be key to the livelihood of humans and other life forms. These functions are collectively performed by the many species that constitute an ecosystem; trees in a forest, plants in a grassland, or bacterial strains in a microbiome. Here, I will use linear algebra to show that generically, there is a sense in which a rare species can have as much importance as an abundant one. The reason why this claim is not obvious comes from the fact that in functional ecology, under the mass-ratio hypothesis, species contributions should be well predicted by their effect traits and abundance. I will illustrate using soil-microbiome data that this hypothesis has merit, even for complex functions related to nutrient cycling. Yet the mass-ratio hypothesis has an awkward corollary: functions are typically performed by just a few dominant species, so that most of an ecosystem's diversity appears redundant, or even useless. To understand why rare species can be important, one has to take a perturbative approach, looking at the sensitivity of a function to say, added mortality (a pathogen) on a given species. Doing so reveals a completely different picture than the one the mass-ratio hypothesis depicts. Via direct and indirect interactions between them, species can have large impacts on a given function, even if those species are rare or if they do not possess traits that relate to the function.

Rachel Stubbington @rstubbington.bsky.social · 2y ago

All are invited to sign this petition in support of saving the free-flowing Tagliamento—the King of Alpine rivers—from fragmentation by two proposed barriers www.freetagliamento.org/it_IT/home-e...

ENG

ITA ENG SIGN THE PETITION! FIND OUT MORE 815 scholars and experts from 35 countries have signed an appeal to ask the competent bodies to guarantee in every way the protection of this river and in…

freetagliamento.org

Charlotte Kunze @ckunze.bsky.social · 2y ago

Read our new paper in EcologicalMonographs esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... We introduce a framework on how to partition species contributions to ecological stability in disturbed communities based on species absolute change in biomass and relative change in proportion.

Francesco Polazzo @fancescopolazzo.bsky.social · 2y ago

Starting here in the best way: presenting a new paper. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Have a look at our new proposed way of calculating response diversity when multiple environmental drivers change simultaneously.

Measuring the Response Diversity of Ecological Communities Experiencing Multifarious Environmental Change

This study explores how response diversity—variability in species' responses to environmental changes—relates ecological stability under complex, multifactorial environmental shifts. The authors intr...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com