Speaker: Jeff Diez, Assistant Professor of Plant Ecology at the University of California - Riverside

Climate change, landscape development, and species invasions are reshuffling ecological communities around the globe. These processes can lead to the loss of biodiversity and changes in ecosystem functions, but also offer an interesting lens through which we can view our place in a dynamic world. In this talk I will present an overview of current research on how ecosystems are changing, with a particular focus on plant and fungal communities, and speculate on the ecological changes to come in the 21^st century.