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Window into the Past

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Thirty years ago, Lou Gross composed a history of the Graduate Program in Ecology.  He has now compiled a website of the data he collected.

Some say UT’s Graduate Program in Ecology was the first PhD-granting program in ecology in the US. The program admitted its first students in 1969 with the first MS graduate in 1971 and PhD graduate in 1972.  It formally became part of EEB in 1995.

Lou recruited those involved in establishing the program to be interviewed by WUOT staff, and several interviews were aired on WUOT’s Segue program.  The recordings are downloadable from this page, including

  • Jim Tanner (of “Ghost Bird” fame), the first interim director of the program;
  • Frank McCormick, the first director of the program;
  • Stan Auerbach, an Environmental Sciences Division Director at ORNL;
  • Mike Pelton;
  • Henry Fribourg.

You may find their various comments about the state of ecology at the time interesting. Lou hopes to add more oral history to the webpage, from other people who were involved in getting EEB started.

Zenni et al. Article

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Graduate Student Rafael Zenni has a new paper in Ecology Letters, entitled “Rapid evolution and range expansion of an invasive plant are driven by provenance–environment interactions” (pdf available here). Ecology Letters is the top journal in the ecological sciences.

Rafael D. Zenni, Joseph K. Bailey, and Daniel Simberloff. 2014.  “Rapid evolution and range expansion of an invasive plant are driven by provenance–environment interactions.”  Ecology Letters.  doi: 10.1111/ele.12278.

Science article on beta diversity

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A recent paper by Kraft, Comita, Chase, EEB faculty member Nate Sanders, Swenson, Crist, Stegen, Vellend, Boyle, Anderson, Cornell, Davies, Freestone, Inouye, Harrison, and Meyers on “Disentangling the Drivers of ? Diversity Along Latitudinal and Elevational Gradients” appeared in today’s Science. This was work done as part of an NCEAS working group.

Abstract:
Understanding spatial variation in biodiversity along environmental gradients is a central theme in ecology. Differences in species compositional turnover among sites (? diversity) occurring along gradients are often used to infer variation in the processes structuring communities. Here, we show that sampling alone predicts changes in ? diversity caused simply by changes in the sizes of species pools. For example, forest inventories sampled along latitudinal and elevational gradients show the well-documented pattern that ? diversity is higher in the tropics and at low elevations. However, after correcting for variation in pooled species richness (? diversity), these differences in ? diversity disappear. Therefore, there is no need to invoke differences in the mechanisms of community assembly in temperate versus tropical systems to explain these global-scale patterns of ? diversity.

PNAS paper on dispersal and coexistence

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A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Michael Bode, Lance Bode, and UTK EEB assistant professor Paul Armsworth examines a novel mechanism that maintains diversity in patchy habitats. Abstract is below. See the full paper here. 


Abstract: The coexistence of multiple species on a smaller number of limiting resources is an enduring ecological paradox. The mechanisms that maintain such biodiversity are of great interest to ecology and of central importance to conservation. We describe and prove a unique and robust mechanism for coexistence: Species that differ only in their dispersal abilities can coexist, if habitat patches are distributed at irregular distances. This mechanism is straightforward and ecologically intuitive, but can nevertheless create complex coexistence patterns that are robust to substantial environmental stochasticity. The Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is noted for its diversity of reef fish species and its complex arrangement of reef habitat. We demonstrate that this mechanism can allow fish species with different pelagic larval durations to stably coexist in the GBR. Further, coexisting species on the GBR often dominate different subregions, defined primarily by cross-shelf position. Interspecific differences in dispersal ability generate similar coexistence patterns when dispersal is influenced by larval behavior and variable oceanographic conditions. Many marine and terrestrial ecosystems are characterized by patchy habitat distributions and contain coexisting species that have different dispersal abilities. This coexistence mechanism is therefore likely to have ecological relevance beyond reef fish.