UCY researchers exchange visit to Hélène's Morlon Lab (CNRS, Paris) for
the iBioGen model development and implementation
During this four-month period, the UCY and CNRS researchers worked in close collaboration and exchanged experience and ideas from their respective empirical (UCY) and theoretical (CNRS) points of view. This collaboration was very fruitful for both partners who worked together on: (1) the description of the first model implemented in the iBioGen R package, which is an individual-based eco-evolutionary simulation model of community assembly that makes joint predictions of species abundance, genetic variation, trait distributions, and phylogenetic relationships for a readership of empirical island biologists, (2) the evaluation of the power and accuracy of the model using simulation experiments and a machine learning approach under a range of parameters chosen to adhere as closely as possible to those of empirical metabarcoding datasets and (3) the implementation of the model using real metabarcoding data from microarthropod assemblages of the Cyprus forests.
The two teams worked together on a manuscript entitled 'Inferring the ecological and evolutionary determinants of community genetic diversity' (Overcast et al., in review) which consists of: (1) a presentation of the iBioGen R package and of the first iBioGen model (2) a thorough testing of the power and accuracy of the model using simulations, and (3) the implementation of the model in the system of Cyprus, as a proof of concept.
The two teams worked together on a manuscript entitled 'Inferring the ecological and evolutionary determinants of community genetic diversity' (Overcast et al., in review) which consists of: (1) a presentation of the iBioGen R package and of the first iBioGen model (2) a thorough testing of the power and accuracy of the model using simulations, and (3) the implementation of the model in the system of Cyprus, as a proof of concept.