Professor and Chair Department of Ecology and Evolution SUNY at Stony Brook State University of New York

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Ph.D. 1982, University of Arizona Gurevitch Lab 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.