This award will provide supplementary support to enable Dr. Thomas Burns of the University of Georgia to conduct collaborative research with Dr. Hiroya Kawanabe for one year at Kyoto University in Japan. They will develop models of various ecosystems in order to enhance techniques for assessing the role of any particular species in the context of its community. Trophic features such as position in the food web, diversity of energy resources, and diversity of energy exploiters, will be studied in the context of the Lake Tanganyika fish community, at which the Japanese laboratory maintains an experimental station. Data from this station will be studied using evolution theory, as developed by Dr. Burns in his Ph.D. thesis, to explore the evolution of trophic relationships, and the influence of those relationships on the evolution of the populations of various species in such a system.
