Abstract:  Appreciation of the fact that an organism’s interactions with its environment and with other organisms are determined by its biological traits rather than its taxonomic identity has led to a recent explosion in the application of in trait-based approaches in ecology, particularly in plant ecology, because these approaches hold the potential of increasing our ability to explain the organization of ecological communities and predict their reorganizations under global change. Reef fish communities are extremely diverse and their ecology still poorly understood; yet, trait based approaches are rarely applied among those communities. This talk review recent applications of trait based approaches to the dispersal ecology and conservation of reef fishes and provide fresh perspectives for future studies using reef fish biological traits.

Biography: Osmar J. Luiz is a marine ecologist interested in reef fish macroecology, coral reef conservation, and statistical modeling.  Osmar did his Ph.D. at the Quantitative Ecology and Evolution Lab at Macquarie University, Sydney and has been applying trait-based approaches to revisiting old questions in reef fish ecology, as well tackling new ones related to the future conservation of coral reefs.