Jennifer Dunne

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Jennifer Dunne is an American ecologist whose research focuses on the network structure of food webs. [1] [2] One of 14 scientists who led critical advances in food web research over the last century, [3] according to the journal Food Webs, Dunne uses ecological network research to compare the varying ways humans interact with other species through space and time, providing a quantitative perspective on sustainability of socio-ecological systems.

Contents

Education

Dunne attended Harvard University, where she earned an A.B. Cum Laude degree in philosophy, and received an M.A. in ecology and systematic biology from San Francisco State University. She earned her Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from the University of California, Berkeley in 2000 and was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral research fellow in biological informatics. [4]

Research and career

Dunne is recognized as a leader in ecological network research, [5] having made significant contributions toward understanding the dynamics and function of ecological networks through modeling and analysis. [6] Ecological networks capture the complex interactions among species that provide structure to biodiversity.

She is the author of more than 70 scientific publications. In 1998, with co-author Neo Martinez, she published her first work on the roles of time, space, and other scales (e.g., species richness) in food web research. [7] In 2002, she published highly cited articles on the network structure of food webs [8] and on the robustness of trophic networks (food webs) in the face of biodiversity loss through extinction. [9] Dunne and her co-authors have also published influential papers on the dynamics of adaptive feeding in ecological networks, [10] cascading extinctions, [11] paleo-ecological networks reconstructed from a 48-million-year old deposit of Messel shale, [12] and networks reconstructed from the Chengjiang and Burgess Shale assemblages -- work which indicates that prehistoric food webs are very similar to modern webs in their network structures. [13]

In 2016, her team published the first highly-detailed food web that included humans (the Sanak Island Aleut) in a complex food web with other species. It suggested that the role Sanak Islanders played in their food web, as supergeneralists, had a stabilizing effect on the ecosystem. [14] [15]

Her current and ongoing research extends the analysis of pre-industrial humans roles in their ecosystems beyond food webs, to include other interactions such as using other species for tools and clothing. It was presented during a Scientific Session at the 2019 annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. [16]

Dunne conducts her research at the Santa Fe Institute, where she is a resident professor and also serves as Vice President for Science. [17] She was named Fellow of The Ecological Society of America in 2017 for deep and central contributions to the theory of food web analyses, including its extension to paleo food webs, [18] and in 2020, was named Fellow of the Network Science Society (NetSci) for her “pioneering work elucidating the network structure of ecology, particularly food webs, highlighting the interplay of dynamics and structure of networks.” [19]

She has served on the editorial boards of Theory in Biosciences and The SFI Press, and was one of the original senior-level editors at the Journal of Complex Networks, Oxford University Press. Dunne also serves as an External Advisor to the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), on the steering committee for ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems, and on the Board of Advisors for the science/culture magazine Nautilus . [20]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theoretical ecology</span>

Theoretical ecology is the scientific discipline devoted to the study of ecological systems using theoretical methods such as simple conceptual models, mathematical models, computational simulations, and advanced data analysis. Effective models improve understanding of the natural world by revealing how the dynamics of species populations are often based on fundamental biological conditions and processes. Further, the field aims to unify a diverse range of empirical observations by assuming that common, mechanistic processes generate observable phenomena across species and ecological environments. Based on biologically realistic assumptions, theoretical ecologists are able to uncover novel, non-intuitive insights about natural processes. Theoretical results are often verified by empirical and observational studies, revealing the power of theoretical methods in both predicting and understanding the noisy, diverse biological world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Food web</span> Natural interconnection of food chains

A food web is the natural interconnection of food chains and a graphical representation of what-eats-what in an ecological community. Position in the food web, or trophic level, is used in ecology to broadly classify organisms as autotrophs or heterotrophs. This is a non-binary classification; some organisms occupy the role of mixotrophs, or autotrophs that additionally obtain organic matter from non-atmospheric sources.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Conservation biology</span> Study of threats to biological diversity

Conservation biology is the study of the conservation of nature and of Earth's biodiversity with the aim of protecting species, their habitats, and ecosystems from excessive rates of extinction and the erosion of biotic interactions. It is an interdisciplinary subject drawing on natural and social sciences, and the practice of natural resource management.

In ecology, an ecosystem is said to possess ecological stability if it is capable of returning to its equilibrium state after a perturbation or does not experience unexpected large changes in its characteristics across time. Although the terms community stability and ecological stability are sometimes used interchangeably, community stability refers only to the characteristics of communities. It is possible for an ecosystem or a community to be stable in some of their properties and unstable in others. For example, a vegetation community in response to a drought might conserve biomass but lose biodiversity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Apex predator</span> Predator at the top of a food chain

An apex predator, also known as a top predator or superpredator, is a predator at the top of a food chain, without natural predators of its own.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Community (ecology)</span> Associated populations of species in a given area

In ecology, a community is a group or association of populations of two or more different species occupying the same geographical area at the same time, also known as a biocoenosis, biotic community, biological community, ecological community, or life assemblage. The term community has a variety of uses. In its simplest form it refers to groups of organisms in a specific place or time, for example, "the fish community of Lake Ontario before industrialization".

A guild is any group of species that exploit the same resources, or that exploit different resources in related ways. It is not necessary that the species within a guild occupy the same, or even similar, ecological niches.

An ecological network is a representation of the biotic interactions in an ecosystem, in which species (nodes) are connected by pairwise interactions (links). These interactions can be trophic or symbiotic. Ecological networks are used to describe and compare the structures of real ecosystems, while network models are used to investigate the effects of network structure on properties such as ecosystem stability.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Biological network</span> Method of representing systems

A biological network is a method of representing systems as complex sets of binary interactions or relations between various biological entities. In general, networks or graphs are used to capture relationships between entities or objects. A typical graphing representation consists of a set of nodes connected by edges.

A food chain is a linear network of links in a food web, often starting with an autotroph, also called a producer, and typically ending at an apex predator, detritivore, or decomposer. It is not the same as a food web. A food chain depicts relations between species based on what they consume for energy in trophic levels, and they are most commonly quantified in length: the number of links between a trophic consumer and the base of the chain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Evolving digital ecological network</span>

Evolving digital ecological networks are webs of interacting, self-replicating, and evolving computer programs that experience the same major ecological interactions as biological organisms. Despite being computational, these programs evolve quickly in an open-ended way, and starting from only one or two ancestral organisms, the formation of ecological networks can be observed in real-time by tracking interactions between the constantly evolving organism phenotypes. These phenotypes may be defined by combinations of logical computations that digital organisms perform and by expressed behaviors that have evolved. The types and outcomes of interactions between phenotypes are determined by task overlap for logic-defined phenotypes and by responses to encounters in the case of behavioral phenotypes. Biologists use these evolving networks to study active and fundamental topics within evolutionary ecology.

Carla Cáceres is a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign known for her research in population, community and evolutionary ecology, focusing on the origins, maintenance, and functional significance of biodiversity within ecosystems. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Ecological Society of America, and the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography

Eric L. Berlow is an American ecologist and data scientist. He co-founded a visual data interface company, which was acquired by Rakuten Inc. in 2016. He now runs Vibrant Data Labs, a social impact data science group currently focused the building on an open-source framework for tracking the flows of money to climate mitigation and resilience efforts on the ground. Prior to Vibrant Data Labs, Berlow was the founding director of the University of California's first science and education institute inside Yosemite National Park which facilitated efforts to leverage data for informing conservation policy and natural resource management. Berlow is internationally recognized for his research on ecological complexity, with articles in Nature, Science, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He is best known for his TED talks on simplifying complexity and finding hidden patterns in complex data. Berlow has received a TED Fellowship, a TED Senior Fellowship, an Alexander Von Humboldt Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Post-doctoral Fellowship, and a National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis Fellowship. He was named one of the top 100 Creatives by Origin magazine.

Nancy Huntly is an American ecologist based at Utah State University, where she is a Professor in the Department of Biology and director of the USU Ecology Center. Her research has been on biodiversity, herbivory, and long-term human ecology. She started her position at USU in 2011, after serving as a Program Officer in the Division of Environmental Biology at the National Science Foundation. Prior to that she was a faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences at Idaho State University (Pocatello).

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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.

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References

  1. ↑ Preston, Elizabeth (21 March 2019). "She Finds Clues to Future Sustainability in Old Food Webs". Quantamagazine.org. Quanta magazine. Retrieved 16 May 2022.
  2. ↑ "Society Fellows". NetSci. Network Science Society. Retrieved 16 May 2022.
  3. ↑ Layman, Craig (2015). "A primer on the history of food web ecology: Fundamental contributions of fourteen researchers". Food Webs. 4: 14–24. doi:10.1016/j.fooweb.2015.07.001 . Retrieved 16 May 2022.
  4. ↑ "Jennifer Dunne". santafe.edu. Retrieved 18 May 2022.
  5. ↑ Baldock, Katherine; Carvalheiro, Luísa G. (6 March 2017). "Influential Women in Ecological Network Research". methodsblog.com. Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Retrieved 18 May 2022.
  6. ↑ Layman, Craig (2015). "A primer on the history of food web ecology: Fundamental contributions of fourteen researchers". Food Webs. 4: 14–24. doi:10.1016/j.fooweb.2015.07.001 . Retrieved 16 May 2022.
  7. ↑ Baldock, Katherine; Carvalheiro, Luísa G. (6 March 2017). "Influential Women in Ecological Network Research". methodsblog.com. Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Retrieved 18 May 2022.
  8. ↑ Dunne, Jennifer A.; Williams, Richard J.; Martinez, Neo D. (16 September 2002). "Food-web structure and network theory: The role of connectance and size". PNAS. 99 (20): 12917–12922. Bibcode:2002PNAS...9912917D. doi: 10.1073/pnas.192407699 . PMC   130560 . PMID   12235364.
  9. ↑ Dunne, Jennifer A.; Williams, Richard J.; Martinez, Neo D. (10 July 2002). "Network structure and biodiversity loss in food webs: robustness increases with connectance". Ecology Letters. 5 (4): 558–567. doi:10.1046/j.1461-0248.2002.00354.x. S2CID   2114852.
  10. ↑ Valdovinos, Fernanda S.; Ramos-Jiliberto, Rodrigo; Garay-Narváez, Leslie; Urbani, Pasquinell; Dunne, Jennifer A. (6 October 2010). "Consequences of adaptive behaviour for the structure and dynamics of food webs". Ecology Letters. 13 (12): 1546–1559. doi: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2010.01535.x . PMID   20937057.
  11. ↑ Dunne, Jennifer A.; Williams, Richard J. (2009). "Cascading extinctions and community collapse in model food webs". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 364 (1542): 1711–1723. doi:10.1098/rstb.2008.0219. PMC   2685420 . PMID   19451122. S2CID   3107210.
  12. ↑ Dunne, Jennifer A.; Labandeira, Conrad C.; Williams, Richard J. (7 May 2014). "Highly resolved early Eocene food webs show development of modern trophic structure after the end-Cretaceous extinction". Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 281 (1782). doi:10.1098/rspb.2013.3280. PMC   3973268 . PMID   24648225.
  13. ↑ Dunne, Jennifer A.; Williams, Richard J.; Martinez, Neo D.; Wood, Rachel A.; Erwin, Douglas H. (29 April 2008). "Compilation and Network Analyses of Cambrian Food Webs". PLOS Biology. 6 (4). e102. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060102 . PMC   2689700 . PMID   18447582.
  14. ↑ Collins, Nathan (26 February 2016). "THE PART WE PLAY IN—NOT JUST ON—OUR ENVIRONMENT". psmag.com. Pacific Standard. Retrieved 19 May 2022.
  15. ↑ Dunne, Jennifer A.; Maschner, Herbert; Betts, Matthew W.; Huntly, Nancy; Russell, Roly; Williams, Richard J.; Wood, Spencer A. (17 February 2016). "The roles and impacts of human hunter-gatherers in North Pacific marine food webs". Scientific Reports. 6: 21179. Bibcode:2016NatSR...621179D. doi:10.1038/srep21179. PMC   4756680 . PMID   26884149. S2CID   23651517.
  16. ↑ "How Humans Interact With Species Across Space and Deep Time". aaas.confex.com. American Association for the Advancement of Science. 17 February 2019. Retrieved 19 May 2022.
  17. ↑ "Jennifer Dunne". santafe.edu. Retrieved 18 May 2022.
  18. ↑ Mize, Alison. "Ecological Society of America announces 2017 Fellows". esa.org. Ecological Society. of America. Retrieved 18 May 2022.
  19. ↑ "Society Fellows". NetSci. Network Science Society. Retrieved 16 May 2022.
  20. ↑ "Jennifer Dunne". santafe.edu. Santa Fe Institute. Retrieved 19 May 2022.
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