Department News
The Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology embraces education and research on all aspects of biodiversity, including the history of life on earth, evolutionary mechanisms that generate diversity, the ecological context in which all life has evolved, and consequences of interactions among organisms, including humans. Faculty expertise ranges from the tropics to the tundra, from the theoretical to the practical.
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Research feature
Network patterns in the Serengeti food web reflect habitat structure
The relationships among organisms in an ecosystem can be described by a food web, a network representing who eats whom. Food web organization has important consequences for how populations change over time, how one species extinction can cause others, and how robustly ecosystems respond to disturbances.
A paper published in December 2011 in PLoS Computational Biology by Ed Baskerville, EEB graduate student (first author) and colleagues, presents a computational method to analyze how species are organized into groups based on their interactions.
“We apply this method to the plant and mammal food web from the Serengeti
savanna ecosystem in Tanzania, a pristine ecosystem increasingly threatened by human impacts,” he writes in the author summary. “This web is unusually detailed, with plants identified down to individual species and corresponding habitats.
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Dr. Marc Ammerlaan has been selected as one of three inaugural Collegiate Lecturers at U-M’s Ann Arbor campus, for his achievements and many contributions to the education of U-M students..jpg)
EEB is delighted to announce that Professor and Chair Deborah Goldberg is one of the 2012 winners of the prestigious Sarah Goddard Power Award.
EEB graduate student Jasmine Crumsey joined nearly 30 other scientists from across the country in Washington, D.C., this week to brief congressional staff members about climate change research.
