The opposition includes doctors, business owners, ecologists and community activists, who are concerned about harm to the air and water, among other potential health, environmental and economic consequences of both the port itself and the additional 18 trains that would rumble through town daily.
Community ecologists have no a priori way of knowing which environmental filters structure local communities [5].
For example, many community ecologists have always doubted the existence of assembly rules or emergent properties of various kinds of multispecies aggregates.
Any biologist looking at milkweeds as a whole would see this mutualism play out, but community ecologists Kailen Mooney of the University of California, Irvine, and Anurag Agrawal of Cornell University wondered if the relationship held on a plant-by-plant basis.
Conservation biologists and community ecologists have increasingly begun to quantify the phylogenetic diversity and phylogenetic dispersion in species assemblages.
Understanding how species are assembled into natural communities in both primary and secondary forests is now a major endeavor of investigation by community ecologists, especially in species-rich tropical biomes [1] [3].
Population and community ecologists (who often have no choice but to use old and outdated taxonomic information to assign names to their specimens) have now become the parataxonomists responsible for training new parataxonomists.
At the same time community ecologists are also interested in whether the phylogenetic diversity in an assemblage is greater or less than that expected given the assemblage species richness.
Richard Ostfeld, a community ecologist at the Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, and ecologist Felicia Keesing of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, knew that in some parts of the East Coast, as many as 50% of ticks carry Lyme disease, while in others only about 5% are infected.
She has held positions as a Lecturer in Ecology & Conservation at Lincoln University and a Plant Community Ecologist at Landcare Research, NZ.
