Carol Boggs
Professor (Teaching)

We are exploring how environmental variation affects life history traits, population structure and dynamics, and species interactions in ecological and evolutionary time, using Lepidoptera. Current interests include (1) how resource allocation strategies interact with foraging and life history in variable environments to affect fitness and population dynamics; (2) the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of small populations, including population re-introductions; and (3) invasion biology, particularly the evolutionary and ecological effects of non-native species' invasion into co-evolved systems..

Gretchen Daily

Future course of extinction, the resulting changes in the delivery of ecosystem services, and novel opportunities for biodiversity conservation. She is developing ways of forecasting changes in biodiversity and certain ecosystem services, based on countryside biogeography, remote sensing, and theoretical modeling.

Rodolfo Dirzo

My current work on conservation biology emphasizes the need of complementing the traditional interests of the conservation of taxa with the increasingly needed conservation of ecological processes. Most of my tropical work is carried out in Mexico and Central Amazonia.

Paul Ehrlich

Conservation biology; ecology, evolution, and behavior of natural populations (especially of butterflies); human ecology and evolution.

Marcus Feldman

Evolution of complex genetic systems that can undergo both natural selection and recombination. Human demographic studies, particularly of the sex ratio. Human molecular evolution.The evolution of learning as one interface between modern methods in artificial intelligence and models of biological processes, including communication. The interaction of biological and cultural evolution, for example in the spread of food plant domestication across Europe, and the transmission of learned behaviors in contemporary groups.

Chris Field

Ecosystem responses to interacting global changes, controls on the carbon and energy balance of natural ecosystems, and ecology and biogeochemistry at the global scale.

Deborah Gordon

Our research examines the social behavior and ecology of social insects. The current research investigates (1) Ant colony organization. (2)Ecology of harvester ant populations.(3)Population genetics of harvester ant populations.(4)The invasive Argentine ant.

Elizabeth Hadly

We study morphologic, genetic, population and community responses to the last several thousand years of climatic change in vertebrate ecosystems of temperate North and South America.

Richard Klein

Richard G. Klein researches the archeological and fossil evidence for the evolution of human behavior. He has done fieldwork in Spain and especially in South Africa, where has excavated ancient sites and analyzed the excavated materials since 1969. He has focused on the behavioral changes that allowed anatomically modern Africans to spread to Eurasia about 50,000 years ago, where they swamped or replaced the Neanderthals and other non-modern Eurasians.

Harold Mooney

Harold Mooney has demonstrated that convergent evolution takes place in the properties of different ecosystems that are subject to comparable climates, and has pioneered in the study of the allocation of resources in plants. Research in his laboratory is currently centered on the study of the impact of enhanced CO2 on ecosystem structure and function.

Dmitri Petrov

To study the role of mutational biases in evolution, we have been using defunct transposable elements to estimate mutational biases in different organisms. Evolution of mitochondrial DNA insertions into the nuclear genome, the evolution of introns and intergenic regions, and experimental evolution of gene regulation.

Joan Roughgarden

We study the relationship between evolutionary biology and ecology using a combination of theoretical ecology and field studies. We use mathematical descriptions of evolution of community structure and population dynamics and we study Anolis lizards in the Caribbean and barnacles in California.

Stephen Schneider

Climatic change, global warming, economic implications of global warming mitigation strategies, food/climate and other environmental/science public policy issues, public understanding of science, ecological implications of climatic change, climatic modeling of paleoclimates and of human impacts on climate, e.g., carbon dioxide “greenhouse effect” or environmental consequences of nuclear war.

Shripad Tuljapurkar

Dynamics and evolution of human and natural populations. Sensitivity and extinction dynamics in the presence of disturbance, population aging and age structural transitions, evolution of senescence.

Peter Vitousek

Nutrient cycling in tropical and temperate forests. Regulation of cycling of nitrogen, phosphorus, and several other nutrients by using chemical analysis of soil, water, and gas samples from field sites. Biological invasion by exotic species, and sources of elements during long-term soil and ecosystem development in the Hawaiian Islands.

Ward Watt

Developing evolutionary theory from mechanistic viewpoints. Using techniques ranging from biochemistry, DNA sequencing, and wind-tunnel flight biophysics to field ecology and mathematical population genetics, we study biochemical and physiological mechanisms of genetic variation, ecological niche structure as the source of natural-selective pressures, and the resulting patterns of evolution of metabolic organization.