Research and Recent Publications

Center for Ecology Research

Research among Center for Ecology members at SIUC spans many areas of basic and applied ecology, ranging from individual and population level studies to ecosystem and landscape scale investigations. The Center for Ecology facilitates collaboration among faculty members and students in different departments at SIUC and provides research incentives including support for seminar speakers and graduate student travel awards.

Examples of Recent Projects 

• Linking biogeochemical effects of multiple human stressors with the structure and function of aquatic communities (Brooks).
• Understanding linkages between mobile top predators (birds) and aquatic food webs (Lovvorn).
• Climate variability and change, climatological methods, and statistical applications in climatology (Schoof)
• Exploration of how the neuroendocrine and immune systems of amphibians interact and determine their responses to ecological variation in resources and infection by ranavirus, an emerging disease of ectotherms (Warne).
• Agricultural geography, organic agriculture, rural land use, watershed management (Duram).
• Evolution of life history traits and population dynamics of waterfowl, interactions between waterfowl and wetlands (Eichholz).
• Community ecology of rivers and lakes, bioenergetics, food webs, life history strategies of fish (Garvey).
• Tropical ecology. Seeds and seedlings (Garwood).
• Population and community ecology of grasslands, exotic species, plant competition, scaling issues, restoration, agroecology (Gibson).
• Reforestation, Bottomland hardwood and oak ecosystem management, forest productivity, mixed species forest stand dynamics, vegetation management, temperate agroforestry systems (Groninger).
• Pennsylvanian Period paleoecology, applied geophysics, earthquake seismology (Henson)
• Atmospheric chemistry, biogenic volatile organic compounds, and organic aerosols (Huff Hartz).
• Population dynamics and genetics of several arthropod species (Ibrahim).
• Populations and habitats of mammals, with a strong conservation focus (Nielsen)
• Primate ecology, behaviour, and cognition, using ape models to understand human evolution (Reichard).
• Assessing human-landscape interactions of Native American and Euro-American cultures through the use of dendrochronology, historical ecology, and paleoecology (Ruffner).
• Global climate change, climatology (Schoof).
• Sediment source tracking, fecal coliform and E. coli contamination across multiple land uses, riparian zone management in agricultural systems, and impacts of land use on water chemistry, hydrology, channel morphometry, and sediment transport (Schoonover).
• Mathematical biology: probabilistic population models in ecology, differential and difference equations in biosciences (Schurz).
• Plant/Pollinator dynamics, plant reproductive ecology, evolutionary ecology (Sipes).
• Aquatic ecology, fish ecology, trophic interactions, fish-habitat relationships, applications of stable isotopes in animal ecology, fisheries management (Whitledge).
• Nutrient and sediment attenuation by riparian buffer zones, riparian buffer zone restoration and management, in-stream cycling of nitrogen, nutrient cycling in forested watersheds, acid precipitation effects on forest and aquatic ecosystems (Williard).
• Regeneration ecology and restoration of forest ecosystems; ontogenetic changes in trees; giant cane propagation and restoration  (Zaczek).