Jerome Goddard
Auburn University at Montgomery, AL·Mathematics & Statistics
Habitat loss and fragmentation break landscapes into patches, and this threatens whether species can survive and live alongside each other. Whether competing species persist in a patchy landscape depends partly on when individuals choose to leave a patch.
- Fields
Mathematics & Statistics
Ecology & Evolution
- Topics
mathematical biology
population dynamics
species coexistence
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Test whether predators change density-dependent emigration, Allee effects and prey stability, using experiments with two Tribolium flour beetle species and a shared natural enemy.
- Measure whether predation alters trade-offs among competition, dispersal and reproduction in Tribolium beetles, and how these trade-offs affect whether competitors coexist.
- Build and analyze reaction-diffusion Lotka-Volterra competition and predator-prey models with nonlinear boundary conditions, informed by experimental data, to study coexistence, invasion and pattern formation.
- Develop new mathematical tools for elliptic boundary value problems with nonlinear boundary conditions, and create a public app that estimates dispersal parameters from field data.
More about the research
This choice can change with crowding, with competitors and with predators. This collaborative project combines laboratory experiments with mathematical models to study how competition, predation and dispersal together affect species coexistence, from single patches to whole landscapes.
Why it matters
The results are expected to apply to conservation programs and nature reserve design. The modeling framework could show how dispersal behavior affects minimum patch sizes, carrying capacities and species-area relationships, and whether a system can settle into more than one stable state. Conservation planners could use this to decide how large and how connected habitat patches must be for competing species to persist under predation.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Volker Rudolf
Rice University, TX·Ecology & Evolution
Measure natural variation in cannibalistic behavior within and among wild populations of the flour beetle Tribolium confusum, to establish how much this extreme selfish behavior differs in nature.
King Yeung Lam
Ohio State University, OH·Mathematics & Statistics
Develop a trait-based partial differential equation (PDE) model of populations in local patchy landscapes that incorporates edge effects and trade-offs between dispersal and reproductive strategies at patch boundaries.
Dionyssios Mantzavinos
University of Kansas, KS·Mathematics & Statistics
Develop analytical tools to establish existence, uniqueness and stability of solutions to nonlinear partial differential equations posed in bounded domains in two or more spatial dimensions.
The school
Auburn University at Montgomery: 1 labs on PI Pages.
Reach out
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