Professor Amy Angert is a population ecologist and evolutionary ecologist, working in the Botany and Zoology departments and Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of British Columbia. Her research is known for pioneering experimental approaches to study species geographic distributions.
Angert co-authored one of the most influential reviews of the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that limit species geographic ranges. [1] Her synthesis of climate-driven range shifts highlighted the difficulty in predicting which species will be able to track climate change. [2]
She has pioneered creative experimental approaches to studying range limits. She was the first to use experimental evolution to test evolutionary mechanisms for species range limits in the field, [3] showing that adaptive trade-offs could limit evolution at range edges. Experiments with Seema Sheth showed that range-edge populations can harbour substantial adaptive variation and responded to artificial selection. Much of her work involves plant in the genus Mimulus as ecological and evolutionary models. [4]
Angert did her PhD with evolutionary biologist Doug Schemske at the University of Washington and Michigan State University. She was hired as a professor of biology at Colorado State University in 2008, and moved to the University of British Columbia in 2012. She won a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair which was renewed for a second term. [5] In 2023 she was elected vice-president to the American Society of Naturalists. [6]
In ecology, a niche is the match of a species to a specific environmental condition. It describes how an organism or population responds to the distribution of resources and competitors and how it in turn alters those same factors. "The type and number of variables comprising the dimensions of an environmental niche vary from one species to another [and] the relative importance of particular environmental variables for a species may vary according to the geographic and biotic contexts".
Biogeography is the study of the distribution of species and ecosystems in geographic space and through geological time. Organisms and biological communities often vary in a regular fashion along geographic gradients of latitude, elevation, isolation and habitat area. Phytogeography is the branch of biogeography that studies the distribution of plants. Zoogeography is the branch that studies distribution of animals. Mycogeography is the branch that studies distribution of fungi, such as mushrooms.
Evolutionary ecology lies at the intersection of ecology and evolutionary biology. It approaches the study of ecology in a way that explicitly considers the evolutionary histories of species and the interactions between them. Conversely, it can be seen as an approach to the study of evolution that incorporates an understanding of the interactions between the species under consideration. The main subfields of evolutionary ecology are life history evolution, sociobiology, the evolution of interspecific interactions and the evolution of biodiversity and of ecological communities.
Daniel Simberloff is an American biologist and ecologist. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1969. He is currently Gore Hunger Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Tennessee, editor-in-chief of the journal Biological Invasions, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Erythranthe guttata, with the common names seep monkeyflower and common yellow monkeyflower, is a yellow bee-pollinated annual or perennial plant. It was formerly known as Mimulus guttatus.
Frederic Edward Clements was an American plant ecologist and pioneer in the study of plant ecology and vegetation succession.
Evolutionary physiology is the study of the biological evolution of physiological structures and processes; that is, the manner in which the functional characteristics of individuals in a population of organisms have responded to natural selection across multiple generations during the history of the population. It is a sub-discipline of both physiology and evolutionary biology. Practitioners in the field come from a variety of backgrounds, including physiology, evolutionary biology, ecology, and genetics.
Cang Hui is a mathematical ecologist at Stellenbosch University. His research interests are proposing models and theories for explaining emerging patterns of biodiversity, networks and adaptive traits in ecology and evolution.
Dolph Schluter is a Canadian professor of Evolutionary Biology and a Canada Research Chair in the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia. Schluter is a major researcher in adaptive radiation and currently studies speciation in the three-spined stickleback, Gasterosteus aculeatus.
Tropical ecology is the study of the relationships between the biotic and abiotic components of the tropics, or the area of the Earth that lies between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. The tropical climate experiences hot, humid weather and rainfall year-round. While many might associate the region solely with the rainforests, the tropics are home to a wide variety of ecosystems that boast a great wealth of biodiversity, from exotic animal species to seldom-found flora. Tropical ecology began with the work of early English naturalists and eventually saw the establishment of research stations throughout the tropics devoted to exploring and documenting these exotic landscapes. The burgeoning ecological study of the tropics has led to increased conservation education and programs devoted to the climate. Tropical ecology provides a wealth of natural resources to humans, this includes contributing to the carbon cycle, with the ability to store 50% of carbon emissions as well as turnover 40% of global oxygen. However, despite the natural services provided by tropical ecology, deforestation is a threat of tropical rainforests. Any plant of interest can be exploited for commercial reasons and extraction of these specific plant species can be at a rapid rate without time for healthy regeneration. Most of the global plant biodiversity is hosted in tropical areas, however studies in this area is mostly covered by scientist from Northern countries. Inclusion of scientist from countries where rainforest is present is heavily encouraged because it extends global knowledge and research which advances scientific contributions, benefiting tropical ecology.
Ecological fitting is "the process whereby organisms colonize and persist in novel environments, use novel resources or form novel associations with other species as a result of the suites of traits that they carry at the time they encounter the novel condition". It can be understood as a situation in which a species' interactions with its biotic and abiotic environment seem to indicate a history of coevolution, when in actuality the relevant traits evolved in response to a different set of biotic and abiotic conditions.
Professor Jane Elith is an ecologist in the School of Botany at the University of Melbourne. She graduated from the School of Agriculture and Forestry at the University of Melbourne in 1977. She specialises in ecological models that focus on spatial analysis and prediction of the habitat of plant and animal species. Following graduation, she was a research assistant and tutor for three years, and then spent the following 12 years raising her children. She returned to the University of Melbourne in 1992 and later commenced a part-time PhD in the School of Botany. She was awarded her PhD in 2002 on 'Predicting the distribution of plants'. Since then, she has been a research fellow in the School of Botany. She is currently an ARC Future Fellow and sits within the Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis at the University of Melbourne.
Judith (Judy) H. Myers is a Canadian-American ecologist. In 2014, she was elected president of the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution, and served in that role until 2016. Professor Myers is well known for her decades-long research into plant-animal-microbe interactions, including insect pest outbreaks, viral pathogens of insects, and pioneering work on biological control of insects and plants, particularly invasive species. Throughout her career she has advocated strongly for both the public understanding of science and for increasing the number of women in the STEM subjects: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
Ruth Geyer Shaw is a professor and principal investigator in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior at the University of Minnesota. She studies the processes involved in genetic variation, specializing in plant population biology and evolutionary quantitative genetics. Her work is particularly relevant in studying the effects of stressors such as climate instability and population fragmentation on evolutionary change in populations. She has developed and applied new statistical methods for her field and is considered a leading population geneticist.
Marie-Josée Fortin is an ecologist and Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. Fortin holds the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Spatial Ecology at the University of Toronto. In 2016, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Sarah E. Diamond is an American ecologist and biologist who is currently the George B. Mayer Chair in Urban and Environmental Studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. A climate scientist, Diamond's research focuses on predicting how ecological and biological systems will respond and adapt to the changing climate.
Mercedes Pascual is an Uruguayan theoretical ecologist, and a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, where she leads the Laboratory for Modeling and Theory in Ecology and Epidemiology (MATE). She was previously the Rosemary Grant Collegiate Professor at the University of Michigan and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
Aimee Dunlap is a North American cognitive ecologist and associate professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She is known for her work on the role of environmental variability in the evolution and ecological function of cognition.
Priyanga Amarasekare is a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and distinguished Fellow of the Ecological Society of America (ESA). Her research is in the fields of mathematical biology and trophic ecology, with a focus on understanding patterns of biodiversity, species dispersal and the impacts of climate change. She received a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship and received ESA's Robert H. MacArthur Award in 2022.
Douglas Schemske is an evolutionary ecologist who made major contributions to research on pollination, the latitudinal gradient in species diversity, the evolution of polyploidy, and plant mating systems.
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