Macroecological laws across microbial communities

Microbes are everywhere. For every human cell of our body, there is at least one bacterial cell living inside us. Due to the advancement of sequencing techniques, there has been an explosion of data that track the composition of microbial communities. In a traditionally data-poor discipline as ecology, this novel richness of data represents a unique opportunity to understand quantitatively how different ecological forces shape diversity. In this talk, I will present three independent, emergent statistical patterns of distribution of abundances across species and communities, which are conserved across different ecosystems. I will then discuss how these "laws" can inform us about the fundamental mechanisms that are shaping the composition of these communities.Non UBCUnreviewedAuthor affiliation: Santa Fe InstitutePostdoctora