Research in the Tewksbury lab
Current research going on in the Tewkslab falls into the following programs:
- Effects of habitat fragmentation and patch isolation on animal behavior and the resulting effects on plant and animal population dynamics . This work has included projects in avian ecology, linking landscape structure, nest predation, brood parasitism, and the behavioral trade-offs faced by breeding birds, as well as large scale experiments testing landscape structure and patch connectivity effects on the mutualisms enabling genetic exchange among plant populations-pollination and seed dispersal.
- The evolution and ecology of plant-animal interactions from herbivory and seed predation to pollination and fruit-frugivore interactions. One part of this research has focused on the adaptive significance of secondary metabolites in ripe fruit, and the ecological and evolutionary interplay between fruit and seed traits and microbial, invertebrate, and vertebrate consumers of the fruits. In this research, we have been using wild chiltepine peppers (Capsicum spp.) as model systems for this work in Bolivia, Arizona and Mexico. More info. A second major part of this research examines the impact of bird loss to tropical forests. Using inter-island experiments on Guam (which has lost vertually all of its birds due to the brown tree-snake) and three nearby islands with intact bird communities, we are examing the roles bird play as top-down controllers of insect herbivores and as seed dispersers for the majority of tropical tree species.
- My lab has recently been working on a series of efforts to bring these first two interests together through an effort to understand the importance of landscape patterns (both human-caused and natural) on ecological processes such as seed dispersal and pollination. This work has led to the development of new tools to track rare dispersal events using stable isotopes, and the exploration of the importance of landscape context and interspecific plant neighborhoods on the dispersal and recruitment of seeds.
- Climate, Latitude, and Diversity. In addition to these programs, my lab group has an active program testing theories relating to the origin and maintenance of latitudinal gradients in species diversity, starting with a synthetic examination of potential causes, and working toward field-based tests of mechanisms. This work has more recently led to a series of projects focused on understanding the impacts of climate change from a mechanistic perspective. By collecting basic data on the physiological performance of species as a function of temperature across a wide range of ectotherms from both temperate and tropical locations, we are now able to show how increases in temperature may translate into impacts on organismal performance, and how these impacts vary throughout the globe.
- Practicing, enabling, and supporting Natural History.Ecology has set itself a large task: the study of interactions between the organisms that inhabit this earth, and the interactions between those organisms and their environment. There are somewhere between 4 and 100 million species on this planet, and we have described roughly 2 million of those species. Of these, less than 1% have been studied in any depth. And the description of each species is just a beginning, as variation among populations, contingency of interactions (due to variation in density, neighbors, climate), and emergent properties (such as feedbacks, thresholds, alternative states etc), create all the hallmarks of a complex system. What is abundantly clear is that the details matter, and the study of these details is the practice of natural history. We turn to ecology to provide answers to questions, but it is the natural history that grounds these answers in the specifics of place and time. We are involved in a number of efforts to promote the value, improve the practice, grow the community and increase the application of natural history. The most visible of these is the The Natural History Network, a 501C3 founded in 2007 by Josh and a group of like-minded collaborators, and an ongoing effort to re-think the relationship between universities, funding agencies, and natural history data collection.
For a detailed look at all of our current research projects, please click HERE link. For detailed looks at Post-doc, graduate-student and undergrad-led research, please follow the PEOPLE link, and click on the pictures or names.
Click for Tewksbury's CV
Contact information
tewksjj@u.washington.edu(email)
