So first off, I'd just like to thank all the organizers, Dr. Mercedes, for putting together such a great group of talks. We already saw some really, a really diversity of talks about diversity and I'm really honored and excited to be here and chat a little bit about my research today. So I'm gonna switch things up a little bit in when we talk about the controls on diversity and I'm gonna do this two ways. So the first is I'm gonna talk about diversity with respect to functional diversity. So moving beyond species and talking about how can we look at the controls on other types of diversity in these systems? And also I'm gonna move beyond looking at just a community and take a much broader scale lens of diversity to try to understand how diversity shifts as we move across scales. So let's think about this idea of community assembly so we can take this island and really what we're asking about is given a snapshot of who's there, can we try to make some inference about the mechanisms that gave rise to that or given just a bare pot of ground, can we try to make some prediction about what types of processes will give rise to diversity in these systems? And when we think of something like this, you know, you have seeds that disperse onto the island, they sprout the seedlings or if we're thinking through plants or trees and some die off because maybe it's too dry or hot and the rest are left there to compete and there's these various biotic processes that prune that system. Now, when we think of this lens of community assembly, I'm sure all of you are somewhat familiar with this type of toy diagram but we often think of it through the idea of these two different filters. So there's an abiotic filter and this biotic filter and we heard a little bit about that yesterday talking about this environmental or habitat filtering. And generally what we're interested in is given this final community, can we try to infer something like the relative importance of these two filters? So there's a regional species pool, species that can survive and give a location sort of pass through the filter. We have the local species pool that would be all the things that could get there and could survive if they're growing in isolation in monoculture. They then interact with each other in this biotic filter and some more species get excluded and we're left with the final abundance of species and some network of their interactions, how they relate to each other. And I'm gonna talk about today this biotic filter primarily through the lens of competition in part because we're thinking of forests, they're really unique organisms, they're very long lived and they're a really nice study system for looking at competition. It's not to say they don't have tons of other processes like herbivory and parasitism. But again, on first approximation competition is a really dominant structuring force in communities. So suppose we just go and we just take snapshots of all these communities, how can we sort of look back in time and try to infer what's going on historically in these systems? And the first idea for this was proposed about 25 years ago, Bayer and Kettie coined this term under dispersion or dispersion and they're talking about it primarily through the lens of functional dispersion. Though now there's a lot of work also with phylogenetic dispersion and this is my definition not theirs, but it's the extent to which the functional diversity of a community differs from that of the species pool. So essentially it's not about whether something is high or low diversity per se, it's about how the diversity of a local community compares to what could be there. And Bayer and Kettie put forth this really simple null hypothesis that when you have really high environmental adversity, so essentially suboptimal conditions, you should see this clustering, this homogenization of functional traits. Things should not only have low diversity, but that should be even lower than you would expect at random. We can sort of think of this if we think of something like the boreal forest, right? There's a lot of frost risk, wind risk.  So even at the just the sort of maybe idiosyncratic assembly processes will select for species that essentially don't stick out in any way. There's the selection for similarity. It could also just be due to the overarching importance of matching specific traits to specific microsite variables. If it's stressful to begin with, you maybe can't survive unless you have exactly the right carbon or nitrogen ratio. So we're gonna see this homogenization, presumably in the systems. At the other end, where we have an absence of environmental adversity, so essentially optimal conditions, this is where we would expect to see competition and other biotic processes really playing a strong role. Things like the principle of limiting similarity, minimization of niche overlap will presumably drive these communities to be more diverse than you would otherwise get if you assembled them at random. So if we think of this through this no model, this little toy diagram, what we're really talking about here are the how permissive and how restrictive these filters are. So in the first case, you have a very restrictive abiotic filter. So it's a really harsh environmental conditions. The only things that pass through are going to be very similar in terms of traits or again, if we're thinking phylogeny in terms of phylogeny. And maybe there's some additional pruning due to competition, but in the end, the resulting community is going to be very, very similar. And so this would be called under dispersion, the diversity of this community relative to the diversity of the regional species pool. And it's often seen as a proxy for the importance of abiotic conditions. Conversely, when you have a very permissive abiotic filter, everything passes through. And then this very restrictive biotic filter in part just due to the intensity of competition weeds out many more species. And what we're left with are species that are functionally very, very different, very unique compared to if you sampled at random. So part of what I'm gonna talk about today is sort of through this idea of trying to disentangle biotic and abiotic processes. But for reasons I'll talk about a bit later, this can also be a little dubious. There are multiple reasons why, for example, competition can cause things to look similar. But one thing we can take away from this just by looking at dispersion is the relative importance of the sort of core principle governing survival. Do species survive by being similar or dissimilar from each other? And I shouldn't this is sort of a powerful way of viewing the idea of coexistence and survival because it's right on the cusp of applied and theoretical in part because this is something you could sort of manage for or something you could measure. It's really hard to go and, you know, manage for something like, I don't like destability or something in these communities. But you certainly on first approximation could try to infer how if species or subsets of species coexist, if you understood the role of similarity and dissimilarity in really governing individual survival. Now, again, I'm sure a lot of you're familiar with this idea, however, at the same time, there's been relatively few really robust tests of the hypotheses before and by her and Katie. The important because the hypothesis is quite complex. They say in order to really understand dispersion, you have to look at four things simultaneously. You can't just look at overall functional diversity. You really have to look at individual traits and try to understand what patterns they show, how these patterns vary across space, maybe within a habitat. How does the size of the species pool? Most importantly, the range of species that you consider, how does this affect this type of pattern? At the most local scale, you're looking at sort of maybe true competition as you zoom out, you're increasingly looking at evolutionary processes, biogeographical sorting, that's governing how different species and different habitats relate to each other. And then lastly, other patterns consistent or do they vary among habitats or across ecosystems or ecoregions? So a lot of people, me included, have done previous work with dispersion, but we tend to take a sort of fix the context. We say this study system in this location across these few pots, and then we say, do we see over under dispersion? Or really to address these hypotheses, we need to look at multiple things simultaneously. We need different spatial scales, multiple habitats and multiple traits. And this really precludes, or is part of the reason why this approach is used a little bit less in community ecology and coexistence theory because this is not something we tend to get. Most experimental oncologists are working on relatively few species or in a single site or maybe across a grading or something like that. So we set out to ask, how could we actually test these questions? And we settled on looking at the global forest system. And this is for sort of two reasons. First off, we have really good compositional data of global forests due to things like a long history of national forest inventories. We also have really good estimates of tree traits compared to a lot of other species. Really basic things like canopy measurements, seed characteristics, these can be much more readily measured on trees, making it a really nice study system for looking at functional dispersion across different spatial scales. And then lastly, we already have really sort of clear expectations for what sort of environments should be optimal, like tropical subtropical rainforest down to dry Mediterranean forest or boreal forest as well. So using sort of the global forest system, we wanted to ask this question, where and how do species survive by being similar or dissimilar? So where does community assembly essentially limit or promote diversity among coexisting individuals? And again, secondarily, maybe we can look at where the abiotic and biotic processes dominate, but I think that's a little riskier. However, in some cases, as I'll talk about with respect to certain traits, we can make pretty clear assumptions about what is going on. So to do this, we're combining two global data sets. So the first is the GFBI data set. This is the Global Forest Biodiversity Initiative. It's over 1.2 million forest plots all across the globe, over 30 million tree-level measurements. And what's really powerful about it, again, is it's true absolute abundance data. We have tree diameter, tree height. We have really robust measurements to give us a really sort of unprecedented snapshot of community composition at the scale. Now, the second thing we need are traits and we obviously don't have measurements for every trait in every location. So we can impute these using the tri-plant trait database, which is, again, tens of millions of plant measurements, not just trees, but herbaceous plants as well. For the full analysis, we focus on 30 different functional traits. Today, I'm just gonna talk about nine of them. And we can actually estimate traits with fairly high accuracy. So using machine learning models, a combination of phylogeny and environmental variables, we have about a 70% accuracy in predicting traits, which for our purposes is fine because we have, with over a million plots, we have such high statistical power that we can sort of overcome any of the noise due to trait mismatch. So the general approach, we combine JPI, we combine tri, and then we're gonna calculate functional dispersion for each plot at varying sampling scales. So these sampling scales define a different size of the regional species pool. And not just ask, what is the functional dispersion of the plot, but ask how this functional dispersion changes as we move across these scales. So I don't wanna make this a talk about no models, but I'll just give you a quick idea of how we actually go about doing this. So we pick a focal plot from GFBI. So here we have seven, seven different plots. This red one is our focal plot. Maybe it has five different tree species in it. Again, we're not just doing presence absence, we're actually looking at the abundances of species too. From this, we have the imputed traits for every species in that location. So a mixture of leaf, wood, root, seed, crown traits. Whatever we think is being selected on both either by biotic or abiotic processes. And then you can use your favorite functional diversity metric. Throughout this analysis, we use Rauss quadratic entropy, in part just because it's been shown to really high statistical power to disentangle biotic from abiotic filtering. Now we need some sort of no model randomization here. So again, this depends on the regional or the size of the species pool. So we can start off at the hyper local scale. We draw a 10 meter radius around the plots. We pick up one new plot and that plot has two new species in it. So now we have a total species pool of seven species. We do a standard randomization where we hold the number of species fixed. And we also hold the relative abundance distribution fixed. In part because we wanna tease apart the precise role of functional trait diversity from other things like just overall diversity. And even though Rauss quadratic entropy is relatively insensitive to richness, a lot of these functional trait metrics really can vary heavily depending both on richness and abundance distributions. So to a thousand randomly sampled communities, for each one of these, we're just shuffling the trait matrix, essentially we're just shuffling traits at random. And we can calculate this no functional diversity distribution across these 1000 randomly sampled communities. Then to estimate dispersion, it's just an estimate of the empirical P value. So we compare our no model to our actual observed functional diversity at this plot. And we see that for example, here it's greater than 96% of the simulations. And therefore our functional dispersion is going to be 0.96. And we can actually do this for increasing sampling radius. So here we have 10 meters, then maybe we've got to 100 meters. We have a new no model randomization. We get a new functional dispersion value. We zoom out to one kilometer and so on and so on. And what I'm gonna talk about today is that to 250 kilometers, right around 300,000 square kilometers. Now we can do this not just for each individual plot, but every single plot, we can do this no model randomization. And that's being over 25 trillion no model randomizations for this dataset. So it's computationally a fun thing to work on as well as sort of theoretically. Actually, but before I go on, does anyone have any questions about sort of this general approach at this point? I don't see any question in the chat. Okay. Yeah, just shoot something in the chat if you are unclear about this. And this sort of no model approach is generally standard. The only difference is again, how you choose the no model. You know, if you're doing something like neutrality, you might use a different type of no model, but the general principle, I'm certain all of you are somewhat familiar with me. So let's look at some other results from this. So what we'll get here are just the marginal curves of dispersion split out across six of the dominant forest biomes. So across the x-axis, we have sampling radius going up to 250 kilometers. The y-axis is dispersion. Here it's just scaled from one to minus one. So zero is no dispersion, essentially extinguishable from the null distribution. A value of one is perfectly over dispersed. So maybe more biotic processes, but things are essentially very, very different than you would get at random. Minus one is things are very clustered, much more clustered than you would get if you sampled at random. And the first thing that jumps out when we look at this is that there's really consistent trends within some biomes and there's some very different trends when we look across these different biomes. So let's start here on the left-hand side looking at boreal forest. Now, boreal forest, I've sort of been using them as my null hypothesis for suboptimal conditions. And in fact, that's exactly what we see playing out, that in these systems, we see a clear consistent signal of under dispersion. At the most local scale, within the sort of meter scale, there's essentially no signal in part just because we're underpowered. But as we zoom out to about a kilometer, we see the strong signal of clustering emerge, suggesting that things are more homogenous, lower functional diversity than you would otherwise expect if you sampled at random. And this under dispersion just grows as you zoom out further and further. When we zoom over to something like the tropical forest, we see the opposite. At local scales, we see a clear signal of over dispersion and this is strongest, somewhat paradoxically in the dry, broadly forest, which I'll talk about a bit more in a minute. And this actually persists for relatively large sampling scales. So it's not until we go out to about 20 kilometer sampling radius in the tropical dry broadly forest that we see the system flip over to sort of habitat filtering emerging as the dominant structuring force. In tropical moist, it's maybe a little bit less, it's about one kilometer. And then when we look at these temperate systems, they tend to fall somewhere in between. Temperate broadly, if we still see over dispersion, but a much flatter curve and the tropical forest just have much higher variation overall in part because both temperate coniferous and tropical coniferous really encompasses a lot of different plant strategies and also has relatively low species richness. The other thing to notice, which I'm sure all of you picked up on that the rate at which this drops from over to under is much stronger in these tropical forests than in the boreal. And part of that is just the diversity of these systems. As we move out to and pick up new plots in tropical systems, we're picking up new species much more rapidly. Whereas in the boreal forest, it's much more homogenous and it's enormous.  So we could scale this x-axis perhaps unlike the proportion of new species and maybe make this a little more uniform, but this really shows how quickly you have this turnover in community as you sample out. Now to get back to the key idea of this workshop, what does this tell us about the mechanisms sort of in quotes that provoked survival and I'd say sort of coexistence, but coexistence in a meta-community framework. Well, the boreal forest again is the easiest thing to think about. Species survive by being similar no matter what. So sort of similarity is the overarching principle that governs survival in these systems. Whereas when we look up to some of these ecoregions that have this transition point, it varies. If you're looking at small scales, then species survive by being dissimilar. At a certain point, there's this inflection point where actually the mechanism governing survival flips and we move from dissimilarity to similarity. This is what I think is sort of to me the most compelling and sort of profound part of this type of work. Thinking back to what we talked about yesterday when there was some debate over the role of triads and these intransitive loops and the difficulty saying is a transitivity really governing coexistence or is it just there independent? And I actually think the problem is a bit deeper than that. It's that there is no such thing as one thing ensuring species survive. That this to some extent is always going to be scale dependent. If you zoom out to 50 kilometers, for example, what this is saying is that survival, whether or not species can coexist, you can predict at least the first order approximation just based on how similar they are dissimilar they are. It has nothing to do with dynamics. Eventually that takes over but that's not what we need to know if we're dealing with these larger areas. And as you zoom across this sampling radius, the so-called mechanism is actually shifting based on the focal scale at which you're operating. Now to go back to Viher and Kedi's first series of questions, they say functional diversity is great but you really need to look at traits. And in fact, look at traits gives us a much more interesting and nuanced view. So here we have the boreal forest and the tropical moist and this is the individual trait dispersion for nine of these traits. So the boreal forest was consistently under dispersed which we see for a lot of traits with the exception of crown height and root depth. For crown height, we just see really, really strong under dispersion. Essentially no matter what scale you look at things have to be as similar with respect to crowns as possible. And again, this makes sense from a biological perspective that if you have different crowns, if you stick out too far, you're increasing risk of frost and wind damage.  However, when we look at something like root depth even though overall functional diversity was under dispersed we see a really strong signal of over dispersion and presumably competition with respect to these below ground processes. And again, this makes sense in the boreal forest below ground conditions are much less variable. They're relatively optimal compared to above ground. And so although above ground is saying everything is as similar as possible we actually see below ground things are as different as possible. So we actually can see how this process governing survival splits based on above versus below ground mechanisms simply by looking at these different traits. And again, if you knew nothing about coexistence theory and I gave you a handful of species in the boreal forest and said, could these survive together? Just based on this you could start to make some basic assumption about whether or not species could coexist relative to another handful of species simply by looking at their functional trait diversity and above versus below ground traits. When we look at the tropical moist broadly forest we see although it was over dispersed we now see why perhaps it was sort of attenuated. Some traits are strongly over dispersed some traits are actually strongly under dispersed. So things like leaf phosphorus root depth specifically vary a lot of these things with like the leaf economic spectrum that we would expect to be indicative of competition we see strong nutrients above and below ground diversification in these systems. But this also shows that the challenge of saying when we see over dispersion or under dispersion we see the importance of biotic versus abiotic. Presumably what we're actually seeing here with leaf area is not the role of abiotic conditions being too stressful with respect to leaf area but almost certainly this is a signal of hierarchical competition. So leaf area is basically directly correlated with your photosynthetic capacity your ability to grow tall to out compete other species and so it's linear or at least correlated strongly with competitive ability. And so things are under dispersed because in order to survive in the tropics you have to have large leaves with the exception of some specific micro sites where maybe there are some trade-offs necessary. When we look at something like stem conduit diameter we're seeing the same basic idea and this reflects this trade-off between moisture stress and moisture uptake. If you have really thin conduits to prevent sort of cavitation under drought conditions this really affects your ability to keep stomata open to be photosynthetically active. And so you're essentially penalized in these tropical conditions if you have really small stem conduit diameters because you limit your photosynthetic capacity. So when we break it up by individual traits we actually really start to get an idea for how species are competing and the mechanisms they're using to interact with each other. Does anyone have any questions at this point? There are a couple of questions in the chat which are about around the same thing. So the question is in summary if you could explain again how the new model was built and in particular I think that the question is about what is the pool of species. So you take this local area and compare the traits with some randomization. So which traits, functional traits and which species go into this randomization? Yes, okay, so the first thing to answer is so the metric we use we use this Rouse quadratic entropy which is essentially mean pairwise distance. So we look at the mean pairwise distance we normalize all the traits so they're sort of all scaled to have the same units and we just get the mean pairwise distance in this nine dimensional trait space. And then we compare that mean pairwise distance to the average mean pairwise distance when we randomize across all different traits. And we use a p-value, this empirical p-value but you could use these scores there's a bunch of different ways and it really doesn't matter much how you do it. The second question of how do we actually pick new species? And this is conditional on, let me go back to a figure real quick. So this is actually conditional on the plots located near that plot. So let's go to smaller. So here we have some focal plot we specify 100 meter radius and then we include in our null model all of the species that occur within plots within that 100 meter radius. So if in some cases if there's a plot that has nothing around it we only use that plot for one point in those plots. So we don't just sort of keep duplicating that value unless we pick up a new species at a different scale. And this sort of touches upon one of the big challenges is that this is conditional on the data and almost certainly we are under sampling rare species in these systems and presumably we're under sampling them most strongly in places like the tropics and potentially this could also be why we're seeing this sort of attenuation. We would have expected to see massive over dispersion in the tropics but in fact we're seeing sort of less than we would have thought and in part that could just be because we're not really adequately capturing the true diversity the true set of species in that regional species pool that were excluded in part because if you're excluded often as seedlings you could be quite rare in these systems and these forest inventories often have like a five or 10 centimeter diameter cutoff.  Hopefully that at least gives a rough idea but feel free to answer any follow up questions. Actually I saw one just come in how are the randomizations done? Yeah so the randomizations where we keep the what they call the community matrix not to be confused with the sort of stability community matrix but they keep this matrix of abundance richness constant and we shuffle the trait values across species. So we're conditioning on species abundances when we do these randomizations. And the idea there is to make sure we're disentangling differences in richness from differences in functional diversity. But I guess the question is when you take these community matrix and you have these list of species and you say you randomize the functional trait associated with species. So you randomize within what pool of species. So you take all the species at the global scale or you take all the species in boreal forests and you randomize their traits within the boreal forest or you trade all the species within a certain region and you randomize the traits among the species within the region. Yeah exactly. So what we're doing is we're saying like for this point let's say like the first point here in the tropical moist broadly force. This is the randomization involving all, for each plot, this is sort of actually an aggregate curve taken across tens of thousands of plots. For each plot we do a separate randomization for that plot including only the species within 10 meters of that plot. And so every single plot has its own no model distribution that starts off with all the species located within 10 meters and we do a randomization then for that same plot we zoom out a little bit larger and we do all the species contained within one kilometer of that plot. So by the time we get, if we zoom this out to a sampling radius of 1,000 kilometers that would be doing a randomization across all traits at the global scale. But here we're only randomizing across species that are nearby to that plot and in growing increasingly far away from that plot. I hope that answers it. I'm not sure if I... So just to be sure then we can move on so basically this would be equivalent to shuffle the abundances of the species that are present within that plot keeping the function, the trait constant. Yeah, that's another thing. We keep our trait matrix constant and we are just... So we have this big trait matrix of all species that occurs within a region and then we just randomly shuffle that abundance distribution for that plot across this trait matrix. Okay. And there are different ways. Some people destroy the correlations among traits but that generally doesn't change much. Here we're assuming, we're keeping each species and instead of traits constant we never break those up. So we're sort of keeping implicit trade-offs and correlations among traits connected within this no model approach. Okay, I think we can move on. Okay. So let's see. Yeah, so I think this sort of goes in a little bit at least with respect to sort of some of the other processes that might be operating here. So when we look at these sort of patterns there's these weird little artifacts that emerge. So in many of these we see this initial low spot and the sort of peak that happens at one or five kilometers outward. In other cases they just sort of hover right around zero. And this is a bit related to what I talked about here. There's the sort of suppression of functional diversity even though tropical moist is generally the most optimal for tree species we see that the dispersion essentially sort of tamp down towards zero. And this is because sort of as a hint at that I'm sure a lot of you are thinking about there's actually another process going on here or presumed process which is that of neutrality in these systems. And when we zoom in really, really far when we essentially look just within a plot or we maybe move a few meters over we pick up a plot right next door we're really only adding one species we're getting we have really no statistical power to really see what's going on in that species pool. And so we're maybe essentially seeing a signal neutrality just as an artifact. And this is sort of Jonathan Chase really put this nicely in this little diagram showing that as you move in zoom in suit closer and closer and closer you move away from niche processes until you've sort of removed all niche sorting and you're just looking at the signal of neutrality. And also in these tropical forests that's where we would expect neutrality to be strongest or at least that's where the idea of neutrality emerged specifically looking through the idea of functional redundancy. So our hypothesis for why the tropical moist is sort of tamped or sort of biased towards zero compared to tropical dry is that tropical dry are often typified by these really strong wet and dry seasons there's really strong niche partitioning temporal niche partitioning and there's much less opportunity for things to be truly neutral, right? You sort of have to be optimized to one scenario or another whereas in these tropical moist there's essentially everything is always good and so potentially this is just a greater signal of neutrality playing out here. And so when we look at these curves that sort of rise in peak at some point that peak gives us sort of the maximal scale the optimal scale at which we can distinguish competition and as we zoom in closer we're moving just like Jonathan Chase showed away from niche processes more towards these stochastic or neutral processes. And this isn't quite along the lines of this workshop but just to show you I've been looking at marginal trends in part because they really illustrate these ideas really clearly but we can do some more true statistics and modeling beneath the scenes so we can sort of control for environmental variables we can control for human activity for soil conditions and try to understand how dispersion varies across these different environmental gradients. When we do this sampling area comes out as the strongest predictor just as we saw as you zoom out things always tend to go down and we know at the global scale a boreal forest is very different than a tropical forest and so sampling area must be the biggest predictor but we also see some things like solar radiation precipitation seasonality, temperature seasonality precipitation of the driest month as well as some soil conditions which we know matter for tree growth like soil again at carbon, cation exchange capacity. So this starts to inform what are the gradients that really define optimal versus suboptimal in these environments. And not to go into it too much detail but just to give you an idea of what we can get out of this so we can actually fit the model the marginal model predicted curves. So here we have high solar radiation, low solar radiation. When we see there's this dual interaction between radiation and solar organic carbon. So if you're in high solar radiation essentially near the equator we see the significant interaction with solar organic carbon that governs over versus under dispersion. But when you move to more solar radiation areas again more towards the poles we now see that there's much less of an effect of solar organic carbon. So in other words we can say that solar radiation is sort of the primary limiting factor and once this primary limiting factor is alleviated, solar organic carbon emergence as a secondary factor. So this is just a hint of some of the other things that we can get out of this as well. Sort of just in the sake of time I'll skip that last slide and move on to some of the things more applied questions that we can do this. Again not really for what we're talking about today but we can actually do some really cool and interesting things. So we can fit a curve for each plot not just the marginal curve that fit a curve to each plot each plot sort of dispersion curve across sampling area. And we can make a map for example of the slope the x-intercept sort of that transition point the y-intercept what the maximum dispersion might be or the minimum dispersion. And just to give you an example so this is global functional dispersion at one kilometer level. And I mean it looks a lot like functional diversity apart from some of these more interesting things you know it's not the Amazon basin that necessarily has the highest functional dispersion even though it might have the highest functional diversity but it's some of these areas like Southeast Asia and Indonesia where we have again these really typified by wet and dry seasons monsoon seasons where we see really strong niche partitioning that is driving higher functional dispersion. And the lowest functional dispersion actually ends up being in these drier regions you know like parts of Australia and then moving up into the boreal forest as well. So this is just an example of the types of sort of applied questions we can do. So just to wrap up what I think is really useful about this first off we can look at these overarching principles governing survival similarity versus dissimilarity which we don't really think of through coexistence but I think I would argue it's maybe one of the the sort of key overarching principles at the global scale when we think of these communities so I'd be eager to chat a bit more about that. Maybe we can get an assembly processes but I think that again is a bit more dubious unless you really look at individual traits. And then for some of these more applied questions we can look at the environmental drivers governing this as well as which traits are most sensitive to these drivers. And then as I alluded to before I think the most interesting thing about this and what I'd be interested to chat more about is how this illustrates that these mechanisms for coexistence are very context dependent. On the one hand we know this if we think of like a patch occupancy model we know the criteria for stability is not the same as stability within a community. But I think that also really questions what we mean when we talk about coexistence. And if we zoom in so close that we're looking at coexistence within a single closed community is that really indicative of these true processes that are what governs at least survival long-term persistence of species at the global scale. And with that I'd like to thank my funding sources again thank the organizers for today thank all of you for listening and just a shameless plug I'm hiring a postdoc so if any of you are interested or know a colleague who's looking for a postdoc position and really anything theoretical it's quite broad feel free to get in touch. And with that thanks again and I'm happy to answer some official questions. Thanks Ben so thanks a lot. There are a couple of questions so Mercedes the question so if you want to ask it and... Yes, thank you Daniel very interesting talk. One question that I think is of relevance is these data sets largely have traits that relate to demography. And there was a very interesting paper on data from the sites in Panama from the famous forest sites in Panama where they showed that if you are looking for traits that influence the frequency dependent negative frequency dependent interactions that underlie some of the hypotheses for coexistence in the rainforest because they are the ones that may underlie both niche formation and some form of balancing selection then and co-evolution then the traits that seem to matter the most were traits that had to do for example with the chemistry of the leaves and not with the demography. So they were completely orthogonal traits to the traits related and this somehow may it's the question I had is a lot of the traits in this data as I said they have to do with demography competition along an access where you want to be more similar or more neutral to coexist. Whether you need some form of negative frequency dependent selection which this kind of effect of distance is very reminiscent of the Johnson-Connell hypothesis operating nearby for which many of the chemical traits may be important. Yeah, I think this is I think raise a really sort of good point. I mean, I'm sort of saying like these are different processes but when we're talking about something like limiting similarity we're really talking about niche differentiation and in effect we're talking about the role of intraspecific self-regulation these negative feedbacks that are driving this here. And so in a way when we see this really strong sort of pushing apart in trade space of species this is some to some extent suggesting that there is some sort of negative density dependence operating these systems. But I think that the demographic traits is a really interesting idea. And I think when we going back to the slide actually pull it up or we talk about hierarchical competition in a sense what we're talking about are traits that are sort of demographic can be related to demographics in some way. And we see different selection operating on something like leaf phosphorus which is true niche it's sort of nutrient differentiation. Presumably root depth is also similar thing they're accessing very different nutrients. We do look at things we also I didn't include them here but we can look at above ground biomass maximum tree growth rate. And those things are generally under dispersed as you would expect like if you're in the tropics you have to be able to grow big in order to survive. And so some of these demographic traits map exactly what we would expect to see. And I think what I sort of like about this and part of this is when we're dealing at these scales there's this I really enjoy working with patterns more and more because we know these patterns are driven by some underlying dynamical process that's operating. But obviously we can't go to every place and measure apart from these really rigorous studies like in Panama you can't necessarily measure long-term growth. And so the patterns they're suggestive but again they give us some nice insight that I think really maps on to what you've mentioned that we see this split by demographic versus nutrient competition in these systems. There was a question from Miguel Rodriguez. Hello, thank you that's really cool work. I have two very minor questions towards the end you had some potential predictors of that dispersion from the different environments but I noted you measuring their strength with R square but then the solar radiation was clearly non-linear the effect of solar radiation. Well, I shouldn't say the effect but the correlation between solar radiation and the dispersion was clearly non-linear. Could that be hiding some important predictors that maybe they are tightly correlated with the dispersion but in not in a linear way for the others that have low values? Yeah, that's a great question. So half the reason we use random force is just because these things are incredibly non-linear and random force it's prone to overfitting a bit but I would rather it's unbiased with respect to the shape of the functional form that you assume, you know, we can fit a linear model and maybe we can extrapolate a bit better but we're going to be wrong everywhere a little bit but your question about R squared so I should have been a bit more clear. So this is actually like you might call it the coefficient of determination it's essentially the normalized mean squared error. So we just plot observed versus predicted and it's just the square of the standard deviation divided by the overall standard deviation. So it's not fitting a line. We're not doing a regression. Yeah, we're just comparing observed to predicted. Okay, that makes a little more sense, thank you. Yeah, and like, you know, it's still relatively high and I do think like, of course there has to be huge variation in part because, you know, people like even though human footprint isn't a great predictor part of that is because somewhere like in Europe where we have these force inventory data everything has a human footprint of essentially one, you know, it's a hundred percent human footprint and so when we go back long enough this idea that humans are disturbing this or just creating noise is going to significantly drop these a little bit. But yeah, it's a good question. Thanks. If I can ask just an unrelated quick one is there a way to control in these kind of models have you addressed the problem of relatedness between the species? You have evaluated the traits but some of these effects might just be the by-product of having very closely related species or very distant related species in the same plots and that way to control for that. Yeah, that's a good question. I would certain how to control for it. We do an analogous randomization where we look at phylogenetic diversity so we use mean phylogenetic distance. I didn't show it because it's a little more complex because when you start to zoom out even closely if we think of something like the tropics there's been a long history of more rapid evolution compared to more pole work systems where the glaciers sort of scraped them and now they're slowly starting to recolonize. So the trends are a lot more complex in part because when we zoom out even to 100 kilometers or something reasonable we're really seeing these evolutionary processes start to govern these patterns much more quickly than we see true competition among things. But to your same extent it could be that what we're seeing is trait differences might just be this neutral trait that has no selective pressure and is again just a by-product of some sort of adaptive radiation somewhere along the lines in history. I mean, it's actually a really interesting point. We haven't thrown this into a predictor like we could certainly throw it into these models and look at something like evolutionary diversification or minimize paralyzed distance or something like that and try to see controlling for environmental conditions and controlling for evolutionary history do we still see traits come out? It would be a cool way to get at the relative importance of traits in phylogen. So that's a nice idea.


Hi, it's Frigid. Welcome to Above Life Channel. The purpose here is to inspire your spirit and to fill you with hope today. It is the springtime and it's actually hot in my room for once. Some of you who've been following my work here on Above Life Channel or on my other YouTube channel, Ferry Grasshopper, you know that I work in a room that's a greenhouse actually and there's like windows above and in front of me here and over here and sometimes that causes weird lights and stuff, lighting and stuff. And it's mostly helpful though, like in the wintertime because it can be warmer in here because of the sun, but also colder because of the windows. So I have like heat stuff going on and then now because today happens to be a warmer day, it's hot. So I'm like, oh, good thing I dressed in layers. Hopefully at some point I'll be able to actually put my hoodie on, but we'll see. Okay. So today and our channeling, because it is springtime, it is March 2022 when I'm recording this, we're going to talk to David Bowie. I love talking to David Bowie, and especially when it comes to galactic or star seed energy. So you may or may not know, but there are lots of levels of spirit guides and lots of levels of energy support that we can tap into. And one of which is what we consider, you know, star energy or galactic or other planet energies. So I have a star guide, a spirit guide that I work with her name is Aria. And I have channeled her in small group for my divine woman group. And so I am very familiar and and burst in, I can translate star energy and I do have clients that are in alignment and have star guides as well. However, that said it's just one of many different kinds of spirit guides that we can have and David Bowie himself has this just real star alignment. So that's really going to be helpful now as we are in the springtime just starting into to be towing into the springtime of 2022. I think that star energy is going to be very helpful I mentioned it in the beginning of the year that it was present. I mentioned that it was going to be a support for us there is higher level healing that we can tap into and utilize and especially with the desire for peace energy right now. And healing peace with healing. It's, it feels as though it's just the perfect time to have this conversation so David Bowie as an afterlife spirit is very highly ascended. What I mean by that is not necessarily hierarchical when I say highly ascended, what I mean is higher vibrational energy. So the frequencies of spirit guides are different. There are some very earthy like guides like totem animals, great totem animals, who are much more very grounded, feel very much connected to our human incarnations. And then there are like archangels, for example, who can feel very light and very almost fairy like and very just super light hearted energetically. I think star guides or star energy ascended energy, like the form of a master a mastery like an ascended master Jesus. That vibrational energy is something that it can be kind of tricky to translate because of the ascended level of energy and the higher frequency vibration because we're matter and mass our bodies. And it can be hard to interpret that. So David Bowie I think does a great job of embodying this ascended energy and is able to translate and transmit the information that we have accessible and available to us. And that comes kind of filters through star energy so I want to bring that and I think it's really helpful here, like I said March of 2022. So let's have a conversation with Bowie. Okay, so now it's getting a little colder in here so that's good so I can put on a hoodie, which in a couple months I won't need any ideas because I will be just like you guys in the summertime. Looking forward to that. I have some purple energy crown chakra coming on. Okay, so David can you come on in. Get real close. The star energy stuff. I don't know how much you were actually going to talk about that or have conversation about that it comes through in shapes and symbols. If you are very clairvoyant you might see the light behind me. You might see life or seat of life energies. You might see symbols like the rose back here up here like that. That's a little more divine feminine not quite as much star energy, but it could be it might be for you though Lotus is the Lotus one, especially when it's blue. The color blue the colors blue and then a little bit of pink can also be because that's more a little more plating blues more Arcturian from my experience personally. I don't know if it's because of star guides but I'm not sure what boy has to share with us today about the star stuff I just know it's part of this conversation so come on in I know I know that I've had to channel you for over a week now. So thanks for being patient with me I appreciate it. Yeah, I think that's a good idea too. I'm going to use this. I actually have two different sprays here I have one from Amanda Alice. She's great she's over in the UK she's another psychic medium intuitive someone who I trust, who has a lot of integrity in her work, and Amanda Alice calm you can get sprays that she actually has this one. She used in collaboration with Prince in the afterlife so you know that I do a lot I've done a lot of work with Prince in the past and so this is one of her sprays with Archangel Metatron as well higher self connection spray awareness and intuition spray we're going to use this we're just going to spray it on the tapestry behind me so I can smell it. Breathe that in use it to clean and clear the air to help raise the vibration to that higher level consciousness as we're having connection. Yeah, they're interesting. There is definitely okay so David is talking to us about right away for me he's really bringing in the divine feminine he's showing me the symbol of the rose behind me that I have the energy of the rose actually the physical this is a real rose that I have here behind me and the divine feminine work that I've been doing. And he's bringing in the energy of the alliance between the divine feminine which we often he he's sharing so I'm getting intuitive information from him, empathically through the heart, but also able to formulate it into kind of cognizance intuition to share with you that's why what I'm doing now that's what's coming through in case you're new here and you don't know that's what's happening right now, I'm channeling him. All right, and he says that the divine feminine often has an alliance with the earth, which we recognize earth as like a female planet or a feminine planet. Very nurturing abundant provides life source sustains us that kind of a thing, but that divine feminine energy and the energy of the galactic or the cosmos, which is very very androgynous much like David Bowie was himself energetically and in human form at times in his life played with gender fluidity of course we know that right you know that right you know that if you don't know anything about David Bowie, Google it up. But my channel isn't about the Google in above my channel is about the channel in. And so we're going to have this conversation at that higher level so catch up. We, we have peace like whoa Bridget sharp sharp. Yes, because I am curious now about this star energy stuff and how it's supposed to help us with the peace and time of peace and healing, because we want healing, we collectively want healing we've been on a mission for healing for a couple of years and for humanity collectively globally, all of us have been struggling with illness in one way shape or form. And it's been plaguing our economies and our educational systems and our families and our hospitals and our care and it's been challenging for all of us which is just a natural tilling of the soil but it's been intense and it's been everywhere. And so with that, there's a healing, a desire demand need basic coordinate of humans for healing. And because of that, the earth energy is supporting and sustaining us as best she can while we are changing everything. Thank you, David bringing in the star energy residents I want to know and we want to know the viewers want to know about 2022 here in the springtime because spring is the energy of new. What is going on. I mean there's now that we've had the pandemic kind of starting to blend into a normalcy. Okay, it's not going to wait but it's like a normalcy, a bit, a bit. It's normalcy in other places it's crisis. And yet, we also have now world conflict, dramatic, challenged conflict that is also challenging history and historical remembrances in humanity. And yet the star energy is present right now in here because of you you're bringing this to me and I did not recognize this to the degree in which you are now telling us that the wisdom of. It's like the future depends on the ancient processing here and now in the present of what is the ancient. Impacting the future based upon the present processing of what is. It's like this reflection you showing me a mirror back a mirror that like looks back at the past to get a deeper understanding not to relive but to deeply understand. In order to. It's not about not repeating the past it's about deeper understanding. So that the higher vibrational energy and it looks like a light green almost like an angel Raphael kind of you guys healing colors kind of a green new opportunities. Raphael is green when I see him. Very doctor doctor angel says, this is a chance to bring in a layer of stability for your change process, because of the recognition of collective recognition of need for healing and the presentation of peace. I see yellow yellow is peace pieces yellow right now, coming in, which is a soul collective desire for peace, and yet. The stabilization of a healing process is not possible. But the piece makes it tolerable. Okay so. So philosophically what is the galactic stuff have to do with that what is the star stuff what is that is it like astrology that we need to be focused on and like mercury retrogrades or moon cycles or solar flares or eclipses or what what you as a human, he says, can leverage through the body. The awareness is of such changes in subtle changes in energy. This brings you like an antenna into receivership and acceptance of higher vibrational energies that come through the galactic streams of consciousness. This doesn't mean a visitation necessarily this doesn't mean the assignment of a star guide for you, however, if you need a higher vibrational healing, or the frequency of something that is different than what has been before for you in your body. You need to recognize and tap into the specific elect electrical currents, energetic electrical.   New word new to you and your body frequencies that are available through the galactic that come in through these electrical currents that are open during these times you guys I do not do astrology. Specifically, like I'm an Aquarius. I know that my chart has like no water in it, which doesn't mean I don't have any emotions by the way just means I'm highly hypersensitive actually very much an air sign and fire. So I think it's air rising if you're curious. I should have an astrology reading like a formal one that would be great maybe I should do that but he's showing us that this is a new level of understanding and an opportunity for you like this could bring you hope this could create some interest in you. So that your physical human body can benefit from the currents, the currents and it's like an electrical current, the currents. To help the physical body attuned like a tuning fork to be adjusted so that the piece can allow for a sense of consistency, palatability, palatability maybe in the events and the unfoldings of the things, the things that were physically seeing inner human eyes and the atrocities that are happening and which by the way, there have been so many. This isn't new. The current events stuff. This is not new. This has been happening in countries all over the world. Where one country decides they want another's assets. And so they pillage the country. This happens. It's been happening. So within our own right. The sovereignty you have of your own body and your own human experience. This is where you have your power. This is where you can affect the healing, and you can allow the piece for you to be received. And it can come from the higher consciousness and the realms of the astral or star guys and the galactic energies. If you so choose. I'm not suggesting it's transcendent like he's not sure he's not saying that this is not above Jesus or Buddha or Allah or whoever you work with as far as any of the deities got goddess aspects etc or your belief systems. This does transcend the mind though yes and the mind will not be able to articulate and fully understand this but your body can. And your body craves the piece is what David Bowie is sharing right now the piece again is the golden light energy which is solar plexus your spirit, and the purpose of some of this is for you to allow your body like a tuning fork to be able to see the higher vibrational frequency like such as the healing that is accessible through the galactic channels. And then he says if you need help for discernment, you can use Archangel Raphael yes Bridget he says tell them Raphael and Metatron he literally just said Metatron, which we had already used the spray right the Metatron spray so Metatron will work which is true. If you're doing work and with clients Metatron is an alignment. He is like the Metatronic energy is like a chiropractor it is an alignment it is a scaffolding it can create, can provide a structure it can, it much, it very much looks like a cellular tower but it's within your body, the pillar of space that you are, and it helps to create or formulate a structure or to change a structure so that you can receive the currents. The electrical energies that are most in alignment for you to be able to present peace. And because of the collective connected into the base intention of healing. This is the part that you want to feel express an experience because you want to emanate that piece and that light of peace comes from your belly your solar plexus. So Metatron is great to keep you in alignment but David is also suggesting Raphael, who is green. Again, Archangel Raphael shows really light green. So if you see color if you're very visual green right, which is perfect for the spring time opportunity for something new, new growth, abundance, learning, expansion, opportunity, that's what green is. Okay. I do have actually another spray of Amanda's again Amanda Alice I'm going to put a link below her stuff here. It's very affordable even though it comes across the pond and has to be shipped and you just got to be a little patient it's pretty quick though it comes pretty quick. I got these as gifts by the way I should share that this is an Archangel Raphael spray it's a healing connection spray I love this one it's like a experiment kind of vibe it's beautiful that just the packaging is gorgeous anyway. I'm going to use this collectively for you for your solar plexus now this green also honors the heart space so we're going to invoke Archangel Raphael, just as though David Boy also suggested Metatron but we're going to invoke Raphael, we're going to be pulling in the healing energy. We're going to request some peace energy, coming into the heart space for you to amplify your personal piece, because this is where you have the power. This is where you can then when you internalize the personal piece within you you can amplify that from your solar plexus okay. So yellow golden yellow David showing me lots of golden yellow energy lots of purple crown chakra lots of yellow golden yellow solar plexus piece radiate piece. Okay, so in order to connect with the galactic energy specifically for healing. You are showing and to access this piece and the electrical kind of currency piece if we are more in tune or understand more about astrology. You're showing me numbers and shapes. So sacred geometry, numerology and astrology. These are ways that we can use to tap into an understand better how to maximize our leverage. What is accessible and available to us that transcends our human consciousness and understanding so the mind isn't going to understand this but. What the energies can be accessed and available to you when you learn about some of these things specifically the astrology piece feels really important. And it feels like solar flares moon cycles, which solar is divine masculine energy, and moon cycles is divine feminine energy which is what the red rose symbolizes for me energetically. A grounded really like a consistent kind of base foundation for us for our lives and he's like showing the body as the place to receive the currency, and to be able to bring to fruition piece. And it's very personal he says that this is a very, very, very personal, and it's individual and unique in your specific encodements, or your specific healing structure for peace it's going to look a little different. Each person is going to look a little different so, even if you use a spray or have Archangel Raphael assist you or have Archangel Metatron assist you or work with David boy or work with the sacred geometry shape of of the. Metatrons cube, I just I'm like oh yeah that's right it's right behind me. Or of the rose or of a lotus, or whatever that might be for you that that you can utilize that to build a solid foundation for peace for yourself and that will then radiate to others in your in your family or interpersonal relationships into your environment, your communities into your countries and into the world. Okay, and the galactic energy that's available is really promoting peace, and it is promoting healing advancement, but the currency of it the electric currency is charged and it's charged and available most easily accessible and and it's not translated easier during these astrological time points and they're showing me dates on a calendar by the I mean Raphael Metatron and boy on dates on calendars that which is numerology stuff. Kind of how we had like in February 2222 kind of thing like that you know, like that kind of thing pay attention. And then like with the equinox like the spring equinox and the summer solstice coming up in June and that kind of thing like that matters matters and then then the alignment of the astrology the full moons especially, and the solar flares and the solar stuff so pay attention to that. It's really personal. Alright, so with that. This is very much about healing is how it feels to me healing and peace, the desire for peace and understanding that we have to kind of go outside of ourselves and bring information into the body and embody it as human, human body, human kind, and then be that radiance of energy coming out from us. Formalized action it's like really about understanding. Oops, my kid just called. Yes, did. Sorry guys. Duty calls family calls. So this is Bridget thanks so much for being here in this unique channeling session with David Bowie from the afterlife. We have inspired your spirit and filled you with some hope this has definitely been a unique session resources will be shared below and the links below if you want a private session with me I am an intuitive life coach in my private sessions my psychic and mediumship work is here in public, and it's accessible to you free here like this. Check out the playlist for David Bowie and for others to find out to get some more insights and inspirational conversations, different types of channeling I do lots of different kinds of channeling. You can check that out. But in the links below if you want to have a private session with me I do offer that as an intuitive life coach so it's a little different than this it's not private channeling of celebrities. So, alright. So I hope I've inspired your spirit filled you with hope and hopefully we've encouraged you to live your life after all this is your life it's yours now so what you do with this information this ascended information from Mr David Bowie. It's up to you. It's up to you to your life. So live it. Just live it. Thanks for being here.


What's going on guys, welcome to a new video. So in this one, I'm going to be answering a really common and popular question I get asked. And I probably get asked this question on a daily basis in fact, which is, what is a good niche? Can you recommend a niche? What is a profitable niche? What is a winning niche? And so on. And it's a really tough answer to question. It's a really tough question to answer because it depends on many different things. It depends on your own circumstances and goals. So I wanted to record this video to give you an answer to go through those different options. So once you've finished watching this video then you'll have a clearer view, a clearer vision of exactly what kind of niches you need to be looking at and why. So I can fully understand why people ask this question. It's a really important question to have the answer to. Especially in the beginning, you wanna take that time to kind of think about what it is you want to achieve, how fast you wanna achieve it and so on, what sort of business you want to run. So I can fully understand why people ask it. It's a really important question hence why I want to record this video. So there's two ways to kind of answer this question and ultimately it comes down to what your goals are and how fast you want to achieve them. So for example, if you wanted to set something up as quickly as possible and start seeing sales come in as quickly as possible and make as much money as quickly as possible and then your answer, the route, the niche you choose is going to be different versus the person who wants to go into something they're passionate about. They want to build a brand around it. They realize it's gonna take a couple of years maybe to build that brand before they can start seeing some decent return. They like and enjoy posting content around that certain niche and ultimately this is what they wanna be doing full time running a business, perhaps bringing in goods in the future, having a unit or using a fulfillment center, et cetera. So starting with the latter, then if you are that person who has a really significant interest in a particular niche or topic whether it's a sport or a pets or travel, whatever it is then my advice to you would be to just choose something you are passionate about one of those things and start building a brand posting some content, putting together like a branding scheme with different colors, different logos, et cetera. And regardless of what products are available within that certain niche just go into that niche because ultimately in the long run you're gonna find it a lot more enjoyable and things that you find enjoyable you will naturally put more time into and the more time you put into your business and the better chats of success you have. Now yes, to get to that point where you might be able to take a full time income from it probably will take longer versus the next method which I'm going to discuss but like I said when you do get to that point it will be much more enjoyable. It's really difficult to stick with something that you just don't enjoy doing. Take it from me in the beginning I sold a whole different range of products products that I weren't proud to say I sold they were nothing dodgy or legal, nothing like that but there were things that I had no interest in personally and when it came to writing product descriptions or email templates I really struggled because I didn't really, I struggled to understand what a potential customer would be thinking about certain products because I didn't have that interest whereas if I take a niche like golf for example I could write about different golf products for the rest of my life because I've played golf for many years I have friends who are golfers and so on and so forth so I know the kind of things they look for I know the kind of words that they use the kind of language they speak so to say so if that is the kind of business that you're picturing in your mind then that would be my recommendation find a niche, find a subject that you're passionate in regardless of what products they are if you build up a big enough following of people then you will sell those products regardless because other people who are also interested in that niche and those products will buy them and if you have a large enough social media following you'll be super profitable too because the majority of your traffic will be organic coming from your socials so in the long run you'll have a business that sustains itself really well and really easily because it'll be super profitable now going over to the other side then if that doesn't kind of attract you or doesn't really kind of excite you very much then the other option is to just focus on what's selling so the first option was to build a brand pick a niche regardless of what it is just pick something you're passionate about have an interest in and so on and then the other option of this if you wanna see results faster see those sales come through the door quicker then your other option is just to focus on what's selling and it's not so much where it's not at all really it's not a case of actually picking a niche so do not limit yourself to a niche do not pick a niche and then try and find products within that niche at this point if you're just trying to make as much money as fast as possible then the niche is irrelevant to you it solely comes down to the individual the specific product to give you an example then of how this is so true is that if you go into the dog niche within the dog niche I don't know it's a stereotypical example but there's so many different products and just because the dog niche is a good niche but just because it is a good niche doesn't mean that every product within a niche is good doesn't matter what niche you go into is gonna have good products and it's gonna have bad products some that sell well at different times of year and some that sell bad at different times of year to give you an example of this then if we take the dog niche we have LED dog collars typically this product sells not typically definitely this product sells well during the winter months Q4 up until probably kind of early March time here in the UK anyway obviously the nights are dark they're shorter in which case there's a bigger demand for the products you only have to go on to Google Trends put LED dog collar and you'll clearly see the spikes in popularity for that product if you try and sell this product through summer which I tried to do my very first year it was just dead as a door now I just couldn't sell them whatsoever and I ended up having a ton of stock left over in which I had to pay for storage for about six months until they started selling again in the other hand if we take the dog cool mat so it's a mat that your dog can lie on and it keeps it cool during the same period again they're pretty much dead as a door now dog owners, pet owners aren't buying these particular products because it's pretty cool pretty cold outside anyway whereas during the summer months this product just flies off the shelves because it's warm here in the UK for about two weeks anyway and people have a requirement and again if you do the Google Trends search for the dog cool mat you'll see the clear spikes and downfalls of the popularity behind a specific product so the point I'm trying to make here is do not limit yourself to a niche do not pick a niche because you've seen it in a video or you've seen it in a Facebook group and think that's a good niche all the products within that niche are gonna be good as well that just isn't the case it all comes down to what time of year it is what the current trends are and what the actual specific and individual product is and with that being said then I think that pretty much just covers everything I wanted to mention in this video there's no need to make it any longer it needs to be so just a very quick recap two routes if you're super passionate about a specific topic and you want to go into something then just choose that niche and go for it regardless focus on building a following bringing in influencers, creating content having a really nice branded website perhaps even private label and some products if you can afford it but just expect results to be slower versus the second method of just simply choosing a specific product not niche, the niche is irrelevant just go with a specific product that is in demand use Google Trends, you sell the trend use the AliExpress drop shipping center check out some of my product research videos where I'll do actually go into full detail show you a few different methods of actually finding trend in products and with that being said then guys I'm gonna wrap it up thank you very much for watching I hope you guys enjoyed it if you did please do make sure you leave a like on the video any comments, questions, video suggestions whatever they are just simply post them down below I read every single comment so I will get back to you finally please do make sure you subscribe as well if you wanna see more of my videos and before you go then one final thing if you are looking for a course that will take you through absolutely everything you need to know in terms of building a business on Shopify including picking niches, picking products, et cetera and then please do check out my Ecom Academy there's tons and tons of content in it all original and it comes with my full support and guidance as well so like I said, check out the link in the video description below if you're interested and apart from that I will see you in the next video and I'll see you guys next time bye bye