The profound fragmentation and degradation of Neotropical forests over the past 50-100 years poses a significant threat to the wildlife populations in Mesoamerica. Neotropical large carnivores, jaguars (Panthera onca) and pumas (Puma concolor), are at particular risk from forest conversion due to their large spatial requirements ...

Chapter 1. Dispersal and migration are spatially limited in many natural populations. Such limitations can lead to clustering of like types, which weakens competition between unlike types; thus, the rate by which a fitter type displaces an inferior competitor can be affected by the spatial scale of movement. We use a birth-death ...

As the pace of environmental change accelerates, biologists are transforming the discipline of ecology from a fundamentally descriptive science to one that can be used to generate skillful forecasts. Although important progress is being made, this work is stymied by (1) our limited understanding of the physical and biological ...

Predation is a strong driver of community assembly, particularly in marine systems. Rockfish and other large fishes are the dominant predators in the rocky subtidal habitats of the San Juan Archipelago in NW Washington State. Here I examine the consumptive effects of these predatory fishes, beginning with a study of rockfish ...

I measured the effects of variation in corolla curvature and nectary aperture radius on pollinator foraging ability using the hawkmoth Manduca sexta and 3D-printed artificial flowers whose shapes were mathematically specified. In dimorphic arrays containing trumpet-shaped flowers and flat-disk flowers, hawkmoths were able ...

Physical environmental characteristics place limits on when and where organisms can survive, thereby shaping distributions and abundances of species. A thermal performance curve is often used to describe the organism’s performance along a thermal environmental gradient. Behavior can moderate temperatures experienced by an ...

There are two generalizable biological impacts of climate change: first, species are shifting their distributions (both pole-ward in latitude and up in elevation), and second, species are advancing their spring phenology. Climate change is having these effects because climate controls both where species exist and when species ...

Invasive species can cause complex, unpredictable changes in ecological community dynamics because they do not share a long evolutionary history with resident species, meaning interactions could be much stronger or weaker than expected. For instance, invasive species often face a suite of both novel potential predators, and ...

Ecology seeks to understand how biotic and abiotic factors influence species distribution and abundance in order to make predictions about the outcome of interactions between species and their environment. The rocky intertidal zone is characterized by strong environmental gradients over small spatial scales, making it an ideal ...

Ongoing anthropogenic climate change has profound implications for species, communities and ecosystems around the world. Yet climate is only one of many important drivers in ecological systems, with topography, soils, disturbance, ontogeny, biotic interactions, land-use and many other factors also playing key roles. To produce ...