Title:Community Assembly Rules in Southern Appalachian Oak Forests

(Research Advisor: Dr. Robert Peet, Mentors: Jason Fridley, Jack Weiss)

Daniel McGlinn

Conservation efforts depend in part on adequate understanding of how ecological communities are assembled, and yet there is much about community assembly that is unknown. My research is an attempt to test whether oak species follow rules of assembly where they co-occur based on their tolerance to important environmental factors and their evolutionary history. I delimited the distribution of 9 oak species in Southern Appalachian forests along gradients of elevation, soil manganese concentration, and a topographically-based estimate of soil moisture. Within these environmental tolerance ranges I constructed models to provide expected patterns of species co-occurrence and then examined deviance from these patterns in the context of each species evolutionary history. This research will increase our understanding of how evolution is implicated in macroecological patterns in plant communities, knowledge that can be used to better manage and preserve forest communities.