Joe Roman | |
---|---|
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Harvard University University of Florida |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Conservation biology |
Institutions | University of Vermont |
Joe Roman is a conservation biologist, marine ecologist, and author of the books Whale [1] , Listed: Dispatches from America's Endangered Species Act , [2] and Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World. His conservation research includes studies of the historical population size of whales, [3] the role of cetaceans in the nitrogen cycle, [4] the relationship between biodiversity and disease, and the genetics of invasions. [5] He is the founding editor of "Eat the Invaders", a website dedicated to controlling invasive species by eating them. [6]
Roman is a Fellow at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont. [7] He earned an AB with Honors in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University in 1985 [8] and an MA in wildlife ecology and conservation from the University of Florida. [7] Roman was awarded his PhD from Harvard's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology in 2003; his dissertation was titled Tracking Anthropogenic Change in the North Atlantic Ocean with Genetic Tools. [9] During his PhD, he co-authored, with Stephen Palumbi, a paper for the journal Science that presented evidence that whale populations had been considerably larger prior to whaling than had previously been thought. [3] [9] By 2009, he was working with the Gund Institute with a Science and Technology Policy Fellowship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, [7] and also beginning a collaboration with the United States Environmental Protection Agency looking at loss of biodiversity. [10] He had a Fulbright Fellowship at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Brazil in 2012, and he was the 2014–15 [11] Sarah and Daniel Hrdy Visiting Fellow in Conservation Biology at Harvard. [12] Born in Queens, New York, Roman lives in Vermont.
His book Listed won the 2012 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists. [14]
Marine mammals are mammals that rely on marine (saltwater) ecosystems for their existence. They include animals such as cetaceans, pinnipeds, sirenians, sea otters and polar bears. They are an informal group, unified only by their reliance on marine environments for feeding and survival.
An invasive species is an introduced species that harms its new environment. Invasive species adversely affect habitats and bioregions, causing ecological, environmental, and/or economic damage. The term can also be used for native species that become harmful to their native environment after human alterations to its food web. Since the 20th century, invasive species have become serious economic, social, and environmental threats worldwide.
Sarah Hrdy is an American anthropologist and primatologist who has made major contributions to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology. She is considered "a highly recognized pioneer in modernizing our understanding of the evolutionary basis of female behavior in both nonhuman and human primates". In 2013, Hrdy received a Lifetime Career Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution from the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.
Balaenidae is a family of whales of the parvorder Mysticeti that contains mostly fossil taxa and two living genera: the right whale, and the closely related bowhead whale.
In population genetics, gene flow is the transfer of genetic material from one population to another. If the rate of gene flow is high enough, then two populations will have equivalent allele frequencies and therefore can be considered a single effective population. It has been shown that it takes only "one migrant per generation" to prevent populations from diverging due to drift. Populations can diverge due to selection even when they are exchanging alleles, if the selection pressure is strong enough. Gene flow is an important mechanism for transferring genetic diversity among populations. Migrants change the distribution of genetic diversity among populations, by modifying allele frequencies. High rates of gene flow can reduce the genetic differentiation between the two groups, increasing homogeneity. For this reason, gene flow has been thought to constrain speciation and prevent range expansion by combining the gene pools of the groups, thus preventing the development of differences in genetic variation that would have led to differentiation and adaptation. In some cases dispersal resulting in gene flow may also result in the addition of novel genetic variants under positive selection to the gene pool of a species or population
Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life forms on Earth. Evolution holds that all species are related and gradually change over generations. In a population, the genetic variations affect the phenotypes of an organism. These changes in the phenotypes will be an advantage to some organisms, which will then be passed on to their offspring. Some examples of evolution in species over many generations are the peppered moth and flightless birds. In the 1930s, the discipline of evolutionary biology emerged through what Julian Huxley called the modern synthesis of understanding, from previously unrelated fields of biological research, such as genetics and ecology, systematics, and paleontology.
The Allee effect is a phenomenon in biology characterized by a correlation between population size or density and the mean individual fitness of a population or species.
George Ledyard Stebbins Jr. was an American botanist and geneticist who is widely regarded as one of the leading evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. Stebbins received his Ph.D. in botany from Harvard University in 1931. He went on to the University of California, Berkeley, where his work with E. B. Babcock on the genetic evolution of plant species, and his association with a group of evolutionary biologists known as the Bay Area Biosystematists, led him to develop a comprehensive synthesis of plant evolution incorporating genetics.
Evolutionary suicide is an evolutionary phenomenon in which the process of adaptation causes the population to become extinct. It provides an alternative explanation for extinction, which is due to misadaptation rather than failure to adapt.
Naomi E. Pierce is an American entomologist and evolutionary biologist who studies plant-herbivore coevolution and is a world authority on butterflies.
Defaunation is the global, local, or functional extinction of animal populations or species from ecological communities. The growth of the human population, combined with advances in harvesting technologies, has led to more intense and efficient exploitation of the environment. This has resulted in the depletion of large vertebrates from ecological communities, creating what has been termed "empty forest". Defaunation differs from extinction; it includes both the disappearance of species and declines in abundance. Defaunation effects were first implied at the Symposium of Plant-Animal Interactions at the University of Campinas, Brazil in 1988 in the context of Neotropical forests. Since then, the term has gained broader usage in conservation biology as a global phenomenon.
Whale feces, the excrement of whales, has a vital role in the ecology of oceans, earning whales the title of "marine ecosystem engineers." This significant ecological role stems from the nutrients and compounds found in whale feces, which have far-reaching effects on marine life.
Extended female sexuality is where the female of a species mates despite being infertile. In most species, the female only engages in copulation when she is fertile. However, extended sexuality has been documented in Old World primates, pair bonded birds and some insects. Extended sexuality is most prominent in human females who exhibit no change in copulation rate across the ovarian cycle.
Stephen R. Palumbi is the Jane and Marshall Steel Jr. Professor in Marine Sciences at Stanford University at Hopkins Marine Station. He also holds a Senior Fellowship at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
Jeannine Cavender-Bares is Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and Director of the Harvard University Herbaria. She is also adjunct professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution & Behavior at the University of Minnesota, where she served on the faculty for over two decades. Her research integrates evolutionary biology, ecology, and physiology by studying the functional traits of plants, with a particular focus on oaks.
Zoe G. Cardon is an American ecosystems ecologist focused on observing and understanding ecosystem interactions in the rhizosphere. She has also played an integral role in developing systems to better study the rhizosphere without digging it up and interfering with the ecosystems using stable isotopes and mathematical modeling. Cardon is currently a senior scientist at the Marine Biology Laboratory at the Ecosystems Center and an adjunct professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University. She is credited with helping to establish the National Microbiome Initiative at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in Washington, D.C.
Invasion genetics is the area of study within biology that examines evolutionary processes in the context of biological invasions. Invasion genetics considers how genetic and demographic factors affect the success of a species introduced outside of its native range, and how the mechanisms of evolution, such as natural selection, mutation, and genetic drift, operate in these populations. Researchers exploring these questions draw upon theory and approaches from a range of biological disciplines, including population genetics, evolutionary ecology, population biology, and phylogeography.
Sharlene E. Santana is a Venezuelan–American biologist, currently serving as the Curator of Mammals at the Burke Museum of Natural History and as a professor of Evolutionary biology at the University of Washington, in Seattle, Washington. Her research primarily focuses on the order Chiroptera (bats), and her work often engages with a diverse range of biological disciplines, including evolution, systematics, biomechanics, behavioral studies, and ecology. Santana has worked to expand opportunities for underrepresented minorities in STEM fields and has relied on innovative applications of technology to increase the amount of high-quality scientific information that is available to the general public.
Richard (Dick) Frankham is an Australian biologist, author, and academic. He is an Emeritus Professor in Biology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.
Diana F. Tomback is an American ecologist and an academic. She is a professor of Integrative Biology at the University of Colorado Denver as well as the policy and outreach coordinator at the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation, a non-profit organization.