One of the great challenges of ecology is to understand the factors that maintain, or undermine, diversity in ecosystems, researchers write in a new report in the journal Science. The researchers detail their development of a new model that—using a tree census and genomic data collected from multiple species in a forest—can predict future fluctuations in the relative abundance of those species. “Losing one species, when there are few to begin with, could result in a less productive forest and potentially one that doesn’t support as many small plants or animals,” said James Lutz, a professor of forest ecology at Utah State University. But predicting future changes in species abundance is a formidable task. …Instead of collecting decades of data from a single forest the team sought to find a more streamlined approach, collecting genomic data from about 100 individuals of each of eight species of trees…