Meeting Abstract

124.3  Tuesday, Jan. 7 14:00  How is dung beetle biology, resource competition and responses to environmental change currently being assessed? ANDREW, N*; HEMMINGS, Z; University of New England nigel.andrew@une.edu.au

The great challenges in predicting how biological organisms will respond to a rapidly changing climate is determining if responses of organisms are idiosyncratic, or whether there are underlying generalities that can be made based on evolutionary relationships, or ecological associations. Dung beetles (Coleoptera: Scarabeinae) are important ecosystem service providers and are also used for comparative studies and the assessment of a variety of ecological theories relevant to all animal taxa. A worldwide meta-analysis will be carried out to assess how dung beetles are being studied, the findings gathered, the literature cited, how these trends have changed over time and among research groups, will be carried out. Data collected will include biotic and abiotic information, species, location, key experimental traits, and responses that can be developed and assessed using network analysis.