ETE People

Research Focus:

My lab focuses on understanding how human activities alter plant communities and ecosystem function at both modern and paleoecological timescales. In particular we are interested in ecological novelty, where new combinations of species or environmental conditions appear in response to global change. Our data sources include modern vegetation surveys, experimental manipulations, trait data, and biogeochemical analyses, combined with historical survey and paleoecological macrofossil data. Currently, our primary focus is on the impact of invasive plants on community composition, ecosystem function, and the links between them in disturbed temperate habitats.

Research Focus:

My research interests include investigating how dramatic changes in climate affects evolution of species at the population, species, and community level. I am particularly interested in understanding trends and drivers of morphological or compositional change.

With ETE, I am interested in how body size ‘rules’ vary over time, and ultimately the role body size plays in building a community

Visit Dr. Balk's site here.

Research Focus:

Andrew is a paleoecologist and paleoanthropologist with a focus on the ecological context of human evolution in Africa during the Plio-Pleistocene. He is currently studying the spatial distribution of functional traits in African mammal communities to better understand how the patterning of functional diversity reflects habitat heterogeneity and environmental correlates such as annual precipitation and vegetation cover. 

Andrew is currently working on the ETE pairs through time project.

Visit Dr. Barr's site here.

Research Focus:

Terrestrial environments: Understanding of climate, plant cover and continental sedimentary environments interactions and reconstruction of terrestrial paleoecosystems and paleolandscapes.

Mass Extinction Events: Continental ecosystem reactions to mass extinction events (K–Pg and P–Tr transition). Paleopalynology as a biostratigraphical tool and as a way to characterize the evolution of continental depositional environments.

Visit Dr. Bercovici's site here.

Research Focus: The overarching focus of the Blois Paleoecology Lab is investigating the relationship between species, communities, and the environment, focusing on the past 21 thousand years of life on earth in order to inform the next one hundred years and beyond. We are particularly interested in determining the the ecological and evolutionary processes that underlie spatial patterns of diversity across the landscape, and how stable the relative influence of those processes have been through time. 

We have many different research projects in the lab, but have been focusing particular attention to understanding drivers of variability vs. cohesion in genetic, population, and community responses to climate change, focusing on small mammals from the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. 

Jessica has been involved in determining stability through time of the patterns and processes of significant species associations.

Visit Dr. Blois's site here.

Research Focus: 

I am a biological anthropologist interested in the relationship between climate and evolution, with a focus on the ecology of human origins in Africa. I study fossil mammals that provide long-term records of ecological and environmental change. I have ongoing projects in the Afar Region (Ethiopia), the lower Omo Valley (Ethiopia), the Lake Turkana Basin (Kenya), and Gorongosa National Park (Mozambique). I also conduct field research in Patagonia to explore the origins and environments of early South American primates. 

My current research with the ETE Working Group involves Late Cenozoic mammalian evolution in the Turkana Basin of Kenya and maintenance of the Turkana Paleontology Database

Research Focus:

I am interested in how ecological patterns and processes change across spatial, temporal, and taxonomic scales. I use this theoretical framework as a way to effectively compare modern and fossil ecological data, both of which exist at very different scales. I study modern and Plio-Pleistocene large mammals from East Africa, specifically in the context of human evolution. 

I am currently working on building a species-time-area-relationship model using modern large mammal data from Amboseli National Park, Kenya to predict Pleistocene large mammal richness from the Koobi Fora Formation, Kenya. 

As a part of ETE, I am currently working on whether climate influences pairwise associations of plant genera through time during the Pleistocene-Holocene.

Visit Dr. Du's site here. 

Research Focus:

I aim my research so that the results of my work are relevant for ongoing discussion about the development of and changes in environments and ecosystems, and to the priorities of society. In recent times I have become active in investigating how humankind and society are capable of solving the looming environmental and climate crisis. I feel that this is the field I can contribute most to the actual benefit of the society, as many times we are forgetting the natural history when investigating the future. 

Within ETE community I am mostly interested how past climates develop, and what controls the terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystems structures through time. I am also the Associate Coordinator for the NOW database, which is one of the largest fossil terrestrial mammal databases.

Visit Dr. Eronen's site here.

Research Focus:

My research is concerned with the relationships between human behavior and evolution, large mammal communities, and environmental change during the late Quaternary. I explore these relationships to address questions relevant to (1) the emergence of modern humans in Africa, (2) the causes and consequences of prehistoric extinctions, and (3) Quaternary climate dynamics. 

Within ETE, I currently direct a field program studying Late Pleistocene paleontological, geological, and archaeological archives in Kenya.

Visit Dr. Faith's site here.

Research Focus:

The goals of my research program are to i) establish modes of biodiversity change through space and time, particularly during environmental perturbations, ii) establish the long (e.g. macroevolution, climate change) and short-term (e.g. species-species interaction) drivers of biodiversity changes at the global, continental, and local scales, and iii) to determine the interactions among species’ niches and community structure primarily using terrestrial mammals. Lately, I have been focusing on changes in the phylogenetic relatedness of terrestrial mammal communities (e.g., Fig. 1). 

As part of ETE, I am leading a project investigating changes in the spatial turnover of community composition (i.e., β diversity) through time.

Visit Dr. Fraser's site here.

Research Focus:

I am community ecologists who studies how plants and invertebrate communities in New England are assembled, and how they will respond to climate change. For example, we have conducted large-scale warming experiments in New England forests and seen how ants respond both to the climate (they like the warmed chambers) and to each other (they fight more for nesting sites in the warmed chambers). We are also working with the northern pitcher plant, Sarracenia purpurea, a carnivorous plant that lives in bogs. It is a model system for understanding the effects of acid rain and atmospheric nitrogen deposition on plant growth and long-term persistence of populations.

As part of ETE, I am currently developing new metrics of species associations that can be used with fossil and modern assemblages.

Visit Dr. Gotelli's site here.

Research Focus:

I am a paleontologist and postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University. My research interests span paleoecology, biogeography, and the history of biodiversity. I am interested in the evolution and ecology of flowering plants, the history of neotropical biodiversity, and biogeography 

As part of ETE, I am currently working on community assembly through time (PAIRS through time).

Visit Dr. Jud's site here. 

Research Focus:

My research involves understanding how mammal communities have changed through in the late Neogene and Quaternary. I am primarily interested in the effects of climate and humans on community turnover, and how other factors such as landscape topography modulates this change. I work on South and Southeast Asian, North American, and East African faunas. I am also interested in body size estimation in proboscideans and the taxonomy and evolution of Neogene and Quaternary proboscideans from South Asia. 



I am currently working on a project to understand the impacts of global climate change on the biogeography of South Asian and East African large mammals in the late Neogene and early Quaternary. 



As part of ETE, I am involved in a project exploring how changes in species associations through time affects the association of organismal traits such as body mass and diet.

Visit Dr. Jukar's site here.

Research Focus: 

I am interested in the factors affecting and controlling species diversity at multiple scales across both space and time. Moreover, I am particularly interested in the effects of global climate change on species diversity and use the fossil record of mammals over the last 40,000 years to evaluate how current changes in global climate may affect diversity patterns in the future. Because it provides a useful way to compare modern species and communities to fossil species and communities, I focus on the similairites and differences in macroecological patterns across space and time.

Visit Dr. Lyon's site here. 

Research Focus:

My current research program focuses on the intersection between ecosystem change and hominin behavior in eastern and southern Africa. By placing hominin evolution within a resolved ecological framework, we can begin to understand the nature and context of important changes in the biology of our ancestors. Fieldwork is crucial to my research program. I currently work in collaboration with the Koobi Fora Research and Training Program (Koobi Fora Field School) in the Turkana Basin of northern Kenya, but have active programs in South Africa and Ethiopia. Increasingly, my work focuses on understanding the ecological dynamics of extant mammal communities in eastern and southern Africa for insights into hominin and non-hominin ecology during the Pleistocene. Most recently, I have begun a project focusing on the relationship between diet and life history characteristics in the yellow baboons (Papio cynocephalus) of Amboseli National Park, Kenya.

Visit Dr. Patterson's site here. 

Research Focus:

I study the dynamics of mammalian ecological and morphological evolution over geologic time (i.e. millions of years) using 3D quantitative methods and ecosystem modeling. I work to understand how environmental perturbations such as climate change, mass extinctions or human-induced habitat change affect mammal communities and their ecosystems. I approach these topics through the study of organismal traits such as tooth ecomorphology, dietary specialization, and body mass. I develop analytical methods using extant species and modern ecosystems that can also be applied to the study of past faunal assemblages.

As part of ETE, I am interested in the role species’ traits play on structuring mammal communities.

Visit Dr. Pineda-Munoz's site here. 

Research Focus:

My research strives to understand the feedback mechanisms between large mammal and plant communities and the effects of climate change on both. Currently, I am focused on how these mechanisms operated within Eastern Africa during the Pliocene, specifically across fossil sites from Northern Ethiopia to Northern Kenya. This research addresses key questions in human evolution, such as how climate change has shaped the landscape in the past and today and how this affects the behavior and assembly of mammal communities, including humans. 

My current ETE focus builds on our previous work showing that humans may have changed the way ecological communities are structured in the present; thus, a group of us are asking if this same pattern holds when you consider the way mammal and plant communities change from site to site. This work has important implications for understanding the future consequences of human impacts on the environment.

Visit Dr. Villaseñor's site here.