Meghana Krishnadas
NCBS, Bengaluru
Meghna Krishnadas is a Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru. Her research focuses on the ecological processes that enable species coexistence and shape plant community dynamics across diverse ecosystems, from tropical forests to alpine grasslands. By integrating field ecology with trait-based and interaction-driven approaches, her work examines how abiotic factors, soil microbes, seed dispersers, and herbivores influence biodiversity and ecosystem resilience under environmental change. Her studies advance understanding of species interactions and their role in maintaining ecosystem stability.
Session 3A: Symposium on Evolutionary Ecology in the Wild
Chairperson: Renee Borges, IISc, Bengaluru
Traits of trees shape community assembly, but intraspecific variation is substantial and meaningful
Understanding the factors shaping species distributions and community assembly is essential for predicting biodiversity loss with global environmental changes. Community structure emerges from species' performance governed by functional traits, heritable features representing fundamental ecological properties such as life history, resource use, and competitive ability, and trade-offs therein. There has been a groundswell of trait-based studies in the past decade, but tropical dry ecosystems (TDEs) remain understudied. We assessed the degree to which traits explain community assembly of trees in response to natural and anthropogenic gradients in a TDE of the Eastern Ghats. First, we examined trait-mediated filtering across broad climate gradients. Then, we investigated whether traits explain woody species' response to the invasion of a savanna understorey by Lantana camara. Finally, we assessed whether within-species trait variation explained species abundances and landscape-scale niche properties. Inter-species variation in traits explained assembly in response to abiotic gradients and invasion, but within-species variation was substantial and affected landscapelevel niche properties, indicating why species-level mean traits yield noisy patterns in assembly.