Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

Sanders

Costa Rica field course

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Faculty Aimee Classen and Nate Sanders taught a Maymester class in Costa Rica focusing on suitability issues. In addition to visiting many farms and conducting field experiments, students conducted trail maintenance in Monteverdi.

costa

NSF Graduate Fellowships – Updated (again)

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Five Six current or incoming EEB students were awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowships or honorable mentions:

Awards:

Honorable mentions:
Update: Also note that Kelly Rooker, a graduate student in math who is in EEB faculty member Sergey Gavrilets‘ lab, was also awarded an NSF fellowship.

Update 2: Angela Chuang has decided to enter EEB in the fall; numbers have been updated to reflect this.

In the areas of ecology and systematics, EEB tied for 12th 9th place out of all universities in awards and honorable mentions (note that UTK EEB is the only department broken out; all other numbers were summed across all departments in other universities). In these areas EEB had more students honored than Harvard, Duke, Stanford, Yale, and many other universities with strong equivalent departments. Below is a table of EEB and all other institutions with any awards or honorable mentions ecology or systematics. Across all areas and departments, UTK got 12 awards and honorable mentions in total.

Institution Awards + Honorable Mentions
University of California-Davis 16
University of Washington 13
University of California-Berkeley 9
University of California-Santa Cruz 9
Cornell University 8
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities 8
Princeton University 7
Texas A & M University Main Campus 7
University of Tennessee Knoxville, all departments 7
University of Tennessee Knoxville, EEB only 6
Colorado State University 6
Michigan State University 6
University of Florida 6
University of Arizona 5
University of Colorado at Boulder 5
University of Georgia 5
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 5
Utah State University 5
Indiana University 4
Oregon State University 4
University of California-Santa Barbara 4
University of Chicago 4
University of Michigan Ann Arbor 4
University of Wisconsin-Madison 4
Pennsylvania State Univ University Park 3
Stanford University 3
University of California-Los Angeles 3
University of California-San Diego 3
University of Montana 3
University of South Florida 3
Yale University 3
Arizona State University 2
Harvard University 2
Montana State University 2
Oklahoma State University 2
Purdue University 2
SUNY at Stony Brook 2
University of California-Irvine 2
University of Hawaii 2
University of Idaho 2
University of Illinois at Chicago 2
University of Kansas Main Campus 2
University of Missouri-Columbia 2
University of Notre Dame 2
University of Pittsburgh 2
University of Texas at Austin 2
University of Utah 2
University of Vermont &amp State Agricultural College 2
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University 2
American Museum Natural History 1
Boise State University 1
Boston University 1
Central Michigan University 1
College of William and Mary 1
Dartmouth College 1
Emory University 1
Florida Gulf Coast University 1
Florida International University 1
Florida State University 1
Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology – University of Hawaii Manoa 1
Humboldt State University 1
Humboldt State University Foundation 1
Kent State University 1
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1
Miami University 1
Missouri State University 1
North Carolina State University 1
North Dakota State University Fargo 1
Old Dominion University 1
Portland State University 1
Rutgers University New Brunswick 1
Salisbury University 1
San Francisco State University 1
San Jose State University 1
Syracuse University 1
Texas State University – San Marcos 1
Trustees of Boston University 1
Tufts University 1
University of Alaska Fairbanks Campus 1
University of California-Riverside 1
University of Central Florida 1
University of Connecticut 1
University of Maine 1
University of Massachusetts Amherst 1
University of Nevada Reno 1
University of New Hampshire 1
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 1
University of North Carolina at Charlotte 1
University of Oklahoma Norman Campus 1
University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras 1
University of Virginia Main Campus 1
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution 1

Institutions with no awards or honorable mentions not listed.

Note that for this table, ecology and systematics correspond to NSF categories “Life Sciences – Ecology”, “Life Sciences – Systematic Biology”.

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.

Ecology Observatory in Oak Ridge

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The Knoxville News-Sentinel newspaper recently covered the establishment of a UT/ORNL site as one of 20 ecological observatories funded as part of a new $434M national program. Members of EEB will be heavily involved in this research.