My research focuses on developing and applying quantitative methods to address questions in conservation biology and environmental risk assessment. The following topics are examples of the types of questions that I am currently interested in:
Species conservation: I am interested in methods and approaches to assess the vulnerability of species to extinction. These include habitat-based metapopulation models for estimating extinction risks in dynamic landscapes; quantitative approaches for incorporating spatial and temporal uncertainties in threatened species assessments based on the IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria; and methods for analysis of population declines and validation of extinction risk estimates.

Human land-use effects: I am interested in methods for projecting human land-use based on human population trends, and integrating these methods with human demographic models, and habitat and demographic models of selected species. These methods will use results of human demographic models as input to land-use models, and use the results of land-use models and forest dynamics models to predict future changes in species’ habitats and the effects of such changes on the species' viability.

Climate change impacts on biodiversity: One of the challenges related to climate change is the prediction of its effects on biodiversity. I am interested in methods that link climate change models, species distribution or habitat suitability models, and metapopulation models with dynamic spatial structure, to predict the vulnerability of species to global climate change.

Demographic Toxicity: Currently, most assessments of the ecological impacts of pollutants use bioassays at the individual organism level. I am interested in developing standard methods that will allow ecotoxicological impacts to be assessed at the more relevant population and species levels. I am also currently editing a book on methods and case studies of ecotoxicological risk assessment at the population level.

Mike Bell's research concerns patterns of morphological variation in time and space in the threespine stickleback fish, Gasterosteus aculeatus. This species complex is emerging as one of the premier systems in evolutionary biology because it exhibits extraordinary phenotypic diversity (Fig. 1) and has several qualities that make it easy to study. Threespine stickleback are widespread in north temperate and boreal regions and have invaded fresh water innumerable times from the ocean to found freshwater populations. Here they occupy diverse habitats and rapidly undergo adaptive radiation that is highly predictably in relation to food type, predation regime, water clarity, and other factors. Consequently, freshwater populations in similar habitats have similar phenotypes and can be used as replicate samples in comparative studies to infer selection mechanisms and the genetic and developmental basis of similar phenotypes in different populations. Stickleback reproductive and parental behavior have been studied for several decades, and extensive knowledge of morphology, behavior, and life history has been combined in studies of population biology and speciation. The first linkage map for threespine stickleback was published in 2001, and rapid progress is being made to develop specialized tools for research in stickleback genomics.
Bell's laboratory houses extensive research collections of threespine stickleback from Cook Inlet Alaska (Fig. 2) and fossil stickleback from Nevada (Fig. 3). The lab is well equipped to study variation of armor traits and body form, and fish can be reared for genetic analysis or to produce subjects for research in behavior and functional morphology. Bell's research interests include variation of armor phenotypes among lake populations in relation to environmental factors, patterns of evolutionary change on the time scale of centuries in fossils (Fig. 4) and generations in modern populations, relationships between ontogeny and morphological variation and between multivariate variation and multivariate evolution, and transmission genetics. He conducts field research in Cook Inlet, Alaska on modern populations and in west-central Nevada on fossil stickleback. Bell collaborates with genomists and developmental geneticists on the evolution of gene expression during skeletal developmental. By focusing on traits of a well-studied species from multiple biological perspectives, he is studying the interactions of phylogeny, environmental change, genetic architecture, development, and natural selection in determining patterns of phenotypic variation in time and space.

Environmental change and its relationship to phylogeny, population genetics, and biodiversity conservation. Expanded description: The Davalos laboratory studies environmental change and its effect on organismal evolution and conservation. The current focus encompasses two broad areas or research: 1) ancient climate change and historical biogeography, and 2) population structure and conservation effects of land use change. Active research projects include reconstructing the history of Caribbean mammals, studying the links between landscape change and the emergence and re-emergence of vector-borne diseases in Amazonia, and quantifying risks to Andean biodiversity from the expansion of illicit crops.

As a student of Richard Lewontin, I decided that it should be possible to test evolutionary hypotheses experimentally. I picked the common colon bacterium, Escherichia coli, because it could grow in defined medium with a generation time of one or two hours and because the genetics and physiology were well known. With this short generation time, competition experiments of fifty generations can be done from Monday to Friday, allowing a free weekend. The bacteria are grown in a chemostat, a continuous flow device that maintains a constant environment, so that the fitness differences of two genotypes can be measured to an accuracy of less than 0.5%. At first, I thought of bacteria as little fruit flies. But they are not. They are very different creatures.
My primary interest in experimental evolution is to understand the causes of natural selection: What conditions in the environment act upon what types of genetic variation to produce natural selection. I, with Tony Dean and Dan Hartl, have established a predictive theory of natural selection linking differences in enzyme activity to differences in fitness in a simple environment (publications 1 and 2). This theory can be extended to more complex environments (publication 4). We are currently extending this work to look at the long-term evolutionary dynamic of specialization.

Sex in bacteria is very different from sex in animals or plants. Sex in bacteria has been separated from reproduction. Bacteria, rather than either being fully sexual or fully asexual, seem to have evolved an optimum level of sexuality or lateral gene transfer between lineages. Also, rather than mixing two lineages in equal proportions as animals and plants do, bacteria can transfer amounts as small as a few hundred bases to nearly half the chromosome. I showed that sexuality is important in E. coli (publications 3 and 5). I am now investigating the importance of lateral gene transfer in Borrelia burgdorferi, the cause of Lyme disease. B. burgdorferi has a very low rate of transfer of very small pieces of DNA, suggesting only the recombinants that have a selective advantage are seen in nature. I have an ongoing interest in species definitions and speciation in bacteria (publications 3, 6, and 10).

Recently, I have started to work on the population genetics of infectious disease bacteria. We have shown that only four of the seventeen clones (serotypes) of the Lyme disease bacterium found in the Northeastern United States cause chronic Lyme disease (publication 9). This simplifies vaccine development. Evgeni Sokurenko and I have developed the idea that evolution is important during a chronic infection (publication 8). We are studying the adaptation of type 1 fimbrae in E. coli during bladder infections (publication 7 and curent work). I am interested in being able to find every mutational change in the genome during adaptation, either in a long-term chemostat experiment or in an infected animal. In this way we can track evolution happening.

I work on the population genetics and molecular evolution of Drosophila as a model system. In general we are attempting to interface life history, populations genetics, pathway influences, and phenotypic effects of individual metabolic enzymes. We have a large database of metabolic enzymes involving glycogen, trehalose and triglyceride synthesis on D. melanogaster. This includes a sample of about 20 gene sequences (down through the glycolytic pathway) that allow us to identify specific amino aid sequences and recognized specific footprints in sequence data that allow inference about possible selective effects. We also have a set of population samples from Florida to Vermont that allow us to identify specific geographic patterns such as latitudinal clines. Using the P-element insertion series in D. melanogaster we have begun the functional knockout of specific genes in critical points. This has already allowed us to test specific effects of pathway activity variation and determine if individual steps have control over metabolic pool steady levels or possibly flux levels. The flux levels are assayed using NMR measurements using 13C stable isotopes. In addition we have an ongoing project funded by the NSF and in collaboration with Paul Schmidt at Penn to study the ecological genetics of the female reproductive diapause trait in Drosophila melanogaster. Our lab's primary role is in the QTL mapping and identification of the gene or genes responsible for this complex trait life history .

Douglas Futuyma's research interests in evolution focus primarily on speciation and the evolution of ecological interactions among species. He has been a Guggenheim and a Fulbright Fellow, the President of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Naturalists, and the American Insitute of Biological Sciences, the editor of Evolution, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is editor of the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, and is the author of the successful textbooks Evolutionary Biology and Evolution.
Most of his work has centered on the population biology of herbivorous insects and the evolution of their affiliation with host plants. Research on several species centered on genetic differences conferring adaptation to different host plants, and cast light on the evolution of host specificity. Recent work has focussed on whether or not constraints on genetic variation are likely to have influenced the phylogenetic history of host associations in a group of leaf beetles, and on the pattern of speciation in this group. Futuyma's students have worked on diverse evolutionary and ecological studies of insect-plant interactions and of speciation in insects.

Lev Ginzburg is a theoretical ecologist. His research centers on the principles involved in formulating equations for population and ecosystem dynamics. He has recently been focusing on an approach for modeling trophic interactions and the theory of population cycles based on maternal effects.
Ginzburg's second area of interest is applied ecology. He has been developing methodologies for ecological risk analysis based on stochastic models of population growth.

Catherine Graham research is in two main areas: empirical work focused on landscape and behavioral ecology, with an emphasis on how human-altered landscapes affect ecological processes; and bioinformatics/geographic information systems modeling to examine how current and historical environmental factors affect patterns of species distribution. At a landscape scale she examines how landscape- and local-level factors influence patterns of habitat use by animals. Particularly, she is interested in bridging the gap between landscape and behavioral ecologists, who generally work at completely different scales. This disparity has resulted in a lack of empirical landscape-oriented behavioral information with which to develop a broad perspective on fragmentation effects. At a regional scale she is integrating museum data, environmental GIS layers, distributional niche models and phylogenetic information to better understand processes that may have led to current species distribution patterns. Catherine focuses on tropical systems and is currently collaborating with researchers from Ecuador, Colombia and Australia.

Prof. Gurevitch is the chairperson (from Sept. 2006) of the department of Ecology and Evolution.
My research spans several traditional categories within the field of ecology. Most of my work involves the experimental investigation of fundamental ecological questions at the level of plant populations and communities. I am also interested in statistical applications in ecology, particularly in the design and analysis of ecological experiments. While my work has always been concerned with addressing questions of basic scientific interest, I have attempted to connect the basic research to issues with applied and conservation relevance.

Plant invasions: One major area of my research in recent years has been using field experiments to test which factors are most responsible for determining community susceptibility or resistance to colonization by invasive plant species in Long Island forests. Most studies on the ecology of invasions have been descriptive (whether quantitative or not), rather than experimental. Taking an experimental approach to this area of tremendous current concern and interest offers a number of compelling advantages, including the opportunity to disentangle and rank the importance of factors contributing to the success or failure of biological invasions. With my colleague Dr. Manuel Lerdau and several postdoctoral and graduate student researchers, we have conducted a series of experiments in which species introductions and manipulation of environmental variables (light and soil resources) test which factors are most important in facilitating or hindering invasion. The work has already confirmed some suspected relationships and presented a number of surprises. Invasion is positively associated with native species diversity, and with soil nitrogen and calcium. It appears that poor soil resources (but not light or disturbance) exclude invasive species from pine barrens communities, but light availability combined with soil resources are critical in allowing or blocking invasives in mixed hardwood forests. We have also examined the ties between the community effects of invasion and the effects at the ecosystem level by evaluating plant nutrient uptake, storage and recycling in leaf litter. This work is ongoing, and future research will focus on changes in plant functional groups in forests as a consequence of invasion and other global bioclimatological changes.

Pine Demography: Another major research interest concerns the demography of pines. I have studied the responses to fire of pitch pines, Pinus rigida, in Long Island pine barrens communities, including the globally rare dwarf pine plains, using long-term demographic data, tree rings, and modeling. Pitch pines depend upon disturbance (primarily fire) to regenerate, but severe fires after long-term fire suppression may have negative consequences for the recovery of these populations. This system offers the unusual and very exciting opportunity to work at the interface between population processes and community structure. The work also touches upon a number of issues related to general plant demographic responses to disturbance, as well as to fire management strategies for fire-prone ecosystems in a suburbanized landscape. With Dr. Fox, I have also worked on the demography of slash pines in Florida, and in the future plan to use a demographic approach to studying an invasive pine in Australia, P. radiata (Monterey or radiata pine).

Statistical problems in ecology: I have also worked on statistical aspects of experimental design and analysis in ecology. This work evolved out of my desire to design and analyze my own field experiments so that I could get the most information possible out of my hard-earned data. In response to the need for making more appropriate and sophisticated statistical techniques available to the ecologists, I co-edited a textbook on this topic (with Sam Scheiner), Design and Analysis of Ecological Experiments (1993, Chapman and Hall; 2nd ed. 2001, Oxford University Press). A major aspect of my statistical efforts has been the development and application of meta-analysis in ecology. Meta-analysis is the quantitative synthesis of the results of independent experiments. Borrowing from meta-analytic techniques in the social science and medicine, I have worked to introduce this approach to the fields of ecology and evolution since the early 1990's. I have both carried out meta-analytic syntheses of ecological research, and been involved in the development of the statistics of meta-analysis to make these methods more applicable to ecological data and ecological questions. In addition, I co-authored a software package for meta-analysis with the goal of making these techniques more accessible to ecologists (MetaWin 2.0, Rosenberg, Adams and Gurevitch, publ. Sinauer Assoc.).

Textbook: Finally, I co-authored a text book, The Ecology of Plants (Gurevitch, Scheiner and Fox, Sinauer Assoc. 2002) designed for upper-division college courses in plant ecology. The origins of writing a textbook grew out of my attempt in my own teaching to bring very current science to undergraduates in a vivid and understandable way, and to communicate my passion for the field.

Jeffrey Levinton has done research on a wide variety of topics, all in the general area of marine ecology. His major interest is in relating feeding biology of marine bottom animals to population and community-level processes. Currently, he is working on feeding selectivity in suspension-feeding bivalves using flow cytometry and video endoscopy. In the last few years, he has also worked on the evolution of resistance to toxic substances and physiological adaptation of growth strategies to temperature regimes. Levinton has also done research on rate of evolution in the fossil record and maintains a strong interest in paleobiology. In collaboration with Gregory Wray, he is working on estimating the timing of the divergence of the animal phyla and has developed evidence against the Cambrian explosion hypothesis. He is currently doing simulations to understand the degree to which molecular data can confirm the notion of a Cambrian explosion. He is also working currently on the role of sexual selection and natural selection in the morphological evolution of fiddler crabs, and their relationship to phylogeny based on molecular data. His students have worked on related research topics, but also on grazing in coral reefs, chemical defense, and rocky shore ecology.
Levinton was a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fulbright Senior Scholar and is the author of a major text in marine biology and a monograph on macroevolution. He has served as an editor for The American Naturalist, Ecology, Ecological Applications, and was head of the Hudson River Fund Panel of the Hudson River Foundation. He is now an editorial advisor for Global Ecology and for the Journal of the Marine Biological Association.

Dianna Padilla's major interests are (1) phenotypic plasticity, its relationship to morphology, and its significance in evolution; (2) plant herbivore functional ecology, especially the evolution of structural defenses of plants and the role of mode of feeding and morphological adaptations of herbivores, and (3) the patterns of spread and impacts of invading species in aquatic ecosystems. Her current research focuses on phenotypic plasticity of the marine snail family Littorinidae and ranges from determining the evolution of form and function of the radular feeding apparatus to studies of the phenotypic variation and function of littorinid radulae when snails are subjected to different foods or environments. She is also actively engaged in studies on the invasion of zebra mussels (Dreissena polymorpha) and other aquatic invaders. These studies include examining factors that influence the patterns of spread of invading species, particularly the movements of humans and the ecological impacts of invading aquatic species on both benthic species (gastropods) and the planktonic community and food web. She is also conducting collaborative work with scientists from the Former Soviet Union who have studied the Eastern European invasion of zebra mussels for more than 20 years. They are testing predictive models of the spread and ecological impacts of zebra mussels as well as summarizing decades of research that have not been previously available to non-Russian scientists.

We are interested in the relationship between variation in regulatory elements, variation in transcripts, and organismal fitness. We use bioinformatic analysis to generate predictions, which are validated experimentally in yeast.

Ongoing projects include:

Length variation in untranslated regions (UTRs) and its relationship to condition-specific gene regulation.
What is the extent of polymorphism in UTR lengths within and between strains? Does variation in UTR lengths have functional or fitness consequences? Is the functional variation neutral or adaptive?

Variation in transcription factor binding sites as a mechanism for condition-specific gene regulation.
Do changes between variants of a binding site affect the cofactors with which bound transcription factors interact?

Neutral expression evolution from intergenic sequence.
What rate of expression change is associated with neutral sequence change?

Fitness consequences of mis-expressed or mis-localized proteins because of deleteterious interactions.
Are duplicate genes differentially expressed or localized in order to keep them from interfering or conglomerating with each other?

F. James Rohlf is a S.U.N.Y. Distinguished Professor and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is interested in the applications of mathematical methods and statistics (especially multivariate statistics) to problems in biology with emphasis on morphometrics and the theory of systematics. Along with Robert Sokal, he is the co-author of the popular text Biometry, now in its third edition.
Recent research projects have been concerned with the relatively new field of geometric morphometrics - using statistics to study variation in the shapes of biological structures its covariation with other variables. It is "geometric" because it involves a more complete capturing of shape than could be done with traditional ad hoc suites of measurements, ratios, and angles. Recent work has focused on some of the mathematical and statistical properties of morphological shape spaces. These methods usually begin with coordinates of landmarks on the organism and often use the thin-plate splines to express the statistical results as deformations. This approach allows rigorous statistical analyses and powerful graphic visualizations of the results. For related information see our morphometrics web page.

My lab group is interested in the genetic and developmental basis of differences among closely related species and how natural and sexual selection bring these differences about. Our work centers on Drosophila melanin patterning as a genetic and developmental model system.
The laboratory is currently studying the evolutionary genetics of melanin patterning and male courtship behavior in the Oriental melanogaster species group. Several lineages in this species group exhibit male specific wing spots (Fig. 1). A recent phylogenetic analysis (Fig. 2) indicates that multiple gains or losses of male wing spots have occurred during the Oriental species group radiation. Intriguingly, species with the male wing spots also exhibit a striking wing display during male courtship. [To view a video of courtship in Drosophila elegans, in which much of our current work is focused, go movie page] D. elegans males also appear to use this display in male-male aggressive interactions [movie page]. Species that do not have male wing spots do not exhibit this behavior. We are currently surveying male courtship behavior throughout the Oriental melanogaster species group in order to understand how this novel behavior has evolved. For example, we would like to know whether the use of the male wing display in courtship evolved before or after its use in male-male interaction and whether specific elements in male courtship, such as circling the female, were prerequisites for evolution of the male wing display.

We are also studying the molecular genetic basis for naturally occurring melanism in D. elegans (Fig. 3). Populations of D. elegans from the northern part of its range (Taiwan, Japan) are dark black in color whereas southern populations (China, SE Asia, Indonesia) are light tan in color. This morph difference is controlled by a single, semidominant, autosomal Mendelian factor. We are in the process of fine-scale mapping of this locus with the ultimate aim of characterizing it at the molecular level. Melanic polymorphisms like this one in D. elegans are extremely common and insects but in no case has such a polymorphism been identified at the molecular level. Identifying the gene responsible for melanism in D. elegans will provide a crucial model for a general understanding of insect melanism at the developmental, genetic, and ecological levels.

John Wiens' research consists of three main areas: (1) phylogenetic approaches to questions in evolution and ecology, (2) the theory and methods of systematics, and (3) the biology of reptiles and amphibians. First, he is interested in using integrative phylogenetic studies of reptiles and amphibians to address diverse topics in evolution and ecology, including patterns of species richness, community assembly, evolution of major changes in body form, life history evolution, and ecological specialization. Second, he is interested in developing and testing methods for reconstructing phylogenies and determining species boundaries. He is particularly interested in the problems of combining data sets, delimiting species, and the analysis of polymorphic and quantitative characters. Third, he is interested in the phylogeny, evolution, ecology, morphology, physiology, and behavior of reptiles and amphibians.