Distinguished Ecologists

2012 - 2013

Peter and Rosemary Grant - Visiting Distinguished Ecologists

April 22 - 25, 2013
Poster

Peter Raymond Grant and Barbara Rosemary Grant, a married couple, are both British evolutionary biologists at Princeton University; each holds the position of Emeritus Professor. They are noted for their work concerning Darwin's finches on the Galápagos Island named Daphne Major. The Grants have spent up to six months of the year each year since 1973 capturing, tagging, and taking blood samples of the finches on the island.

The Grants were the subject of the book The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994)

In 2003 the Grants were joint recipients of the Loye and Alden Miller Research Award. They won the 2005 Balzan Prize for Population Biology. The Balzan Prize citation states:

Peter and Rosemary Grant are distinguished for their remarkable long-term studies demonstrating evolution in action in Galápagos finches. They have demonstrated how very rapid changes in body and beak size in response to changes in the food supply are driven by natural selection. They have also elucidated the mechanisms by which new species arise and how genetic diversity is maintained in natural populations. The work of the Grants has had a seminal influence in the fields of population biology, evolution and ecology.

Peter was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1987 and Rosemary in 2007. In 2008 both Peter and Rosemary Grant were among the thirteen recipients of the Darwin-Wallace Medal, which is bestowed every 50 years by the Linnean Society of London. In 2009 they were recipients of the annual Kyoto Prize in basic sciences, an international award honoring significant contributions to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of mankind.

Taylor Ricketts - Visiting Distinguished Ecologist

March 26 - 29, 2013
Dr. Ricketts's Schedule | Poster

Taylor integrates natural and social sciences to address both fundamental scientific issues and real-world conservation problems. His recent work focuses on the economic benefits provided to people by forests, wetlands, reefs, and other natural areas. Other areas of interest to Taylor include: community and landscape ecology, ecosystem services, ecological economics, conservation biology, environmental policy, and biogeography.

Taylor is co-founder of the Natural Capital Project, a partnership among universities and NGOs that maps and values natural benefits for different communities around the world. He has served as Convening Lead Author for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a 5-year, UN-sponsored effort to assess global ecosystems and their contributions to human wellbeing. These and other collaborations are part of Taylor's continuing effort to link rigorous research with practical conservation and policy efforts worldwide. Before arriving at UVM in 2011, he led World Wildlife Fund's Conservation Science Program for nine years and continues to serves as a Senior Fellow at WWF.

Taylor is the author of over 70 scientific publications, and his work has been featured in over 100 stories, in more than 20 media outlets.

Ray Callaway - Visiting Distinguished Ecologist

April 3 - 4, 2013
Dr. Callaway's Schedule | Poster

Dr. Callaway's lab is a horizontally organized group of postdoctoral, graduate student, and undergraduate collaborators. The primary focus of the research in the lab is on how organisms interact with each other, but the collaborators are interested in all aspects of ecology. These interactions include direct interactions, such as competition for resources, allelopathy, and facilitation; and indirect interactions mediated by herbivores, soil microbes, and other competitors. Dr. Callaway continues to study facilitative interactions among plants, mostly alpine habitats and in collaboration with the international Alpine Pals research group. But because of how Dr. Callaway's graduate students have influenced his interests over the last 15 years, most of his time is now spent on exploring how exotic invaders dominate habitats despite limited opportunities for local adaption, and suppress native species which have had ample opportunities to locally adapt.

Specific interests in invasions include the role of soil biota, novel biochemical interactions with native competitors, microbes, and generalist herbivores, and using invaders to test general ideas about competition. Dr. Callaway and those in his lab has generally found that naive native species are more susceptible to the chemical effects of invaders than species native to the invader's ranges. For example, three of North America's more aggressive invaders, Acroptilon repens, Centaurea stoebe and C. diffusa, show evidence for being more competitive and/or more allelopathic to North American species than species in the native ranges of the invaders.

Suzie Boyden - Honor Alumna

September 19 - 20, 2012
Dr. Boyden's Schedule | Poster

Suzie Boyden graduated with a Ph.D. from GDPE in 2005. After a three-year post-doctoral appointment at University of Minnesota, Dr. Boyden joined the faculty at Clarion University, a primarily undergraduate teaching institution in the Pennsylvania State System. Dr. Boyden teaches undergraduate courses in Principles of Ecology, Forest Ecology, Community and Ecosystem Ecology, and Ecological Applications. Her research focuses one how the structure and spatial arrangement of trees influences forest ecosystem processes such as growth, regeneration, resource availability, and competitive or facilitative interactions.

Dr. Boyden will join us in the fall semester to talk about the use of neighborhood likelihood modeling to understand resource competition in Brazilian plantations, red pine forests of Minnesota, and Allegheny hardwoods. Dr. Boyden will also touch on the rewards and challenges of the path she chose after leaving GDPE- providing some insight on the realities of maintaining a research program at a non-research-oriented school while also raising a family.

Tom Stohlgren - Resident Distinguished Ecologist

October 17, 2012
Dr. Stohlgren's Schedule | Poster

Tom Stohlgren is recognized as one of the top ten most productive scientists in the world in the field of biological invasions. He has published over 190 scientific papers and a textbook on methods of assessing plant diversity. He earned his Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of California, Davis. Stohlgren is a Research Scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey Fort Collins Science Center, and has worked for the Department of the Interior for 33 years. He has won several Departmental awards including two Partners in Conservation Awards, and the Meritorious Service Award. He is prouder of his awards for "Coach of the Year" in local youth league baseball, GDPE "Good Citizen" award, and his graduate students.

He's held an Affiliate Faculty position at Colorado State University since 1991, and has been a Senior Scientist at the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory for over 21 years. He teaches graduate classes on philosophy of science, invasion ecology, and technical writing. Because of his exuberant teaching style and expertise on biological invasions, he is invited around the globe to lecture on harmful invasive plants, animals, and diseases. Stohlgren is USGS Liaison to the National Ecological Observatory Network and helps on issues related to biological sampling and scaling. He directs the National Institute of Invasive Species Science (http://www.NIISS.org). He dreams of developing a new center for Modeling Species Distributions and Ecological Forecasting. He is internationally known as the fun-loving scientist who wears Hawaiian shirts every day. In his copious spare time, he has published three novels, posted five screenplays, and written one theatrical play. His first two novels were nominated for the Colorado Author Award.