Jonathan Walter
University of California-Davis, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Populations of plants and animals rise and fall over time. When those ups and downs line up, a pattern called synchrony, the effects matter.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Plant Science & Agriculture
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
synchrony
functional traits
plant traits
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Test how plant functional traits, the physical, physiological and seasonal features of species, influence population and community synchrony, using multi-site time series from the global Nutrient Network grassland experiment.
- Combine multiple trait databases with newly collected trait data, and describe how community trait makeup responds to added nutrients and reduced grazing by herbivores.
- Develop and test frameworks and methods that link trait-by-environment interactions to synchrony across environmental gradients and levels of ecological organization.
More about the research
If the same species booms and crashes together in many places, it is more likely to go extinct. If many species in one place fluctuate together, the whole ecosystem becomes less stable. Most research has blamed outside forces such as temperature and rainfall for synchrony. Species traits, the physical, physiological and seasonal features of each species, probably matter too, and their influence may change with environmental conditions.
Why it matters
Knowing which species traits make populations and communities rise and fall together could help explain why some species face higher extinction risk and why some ecosystems are less stable. That understanding could help land managers protect grasslands and predict how ecosystems will respond to fertilizer pollution, changes in grazing, and future environmental change.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Albert Ruhi
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Ecology & Evolution·Early-career
Identify what controls metacommunity stability in streams, focusing on drought-driven dispersal limits and population synchrony, using long-term monitoring and field experiments in an intermittent river network in Pinnacles National Park.
Erika Hersch-Green
Michigan Technological University, MI·Ecology & Evolution·Early-career
Characterize how genome size, transcriptome expression and elemental composition relate to physiological traits across cytotypes, the forms of a species with different chromosome-set numbers, in one allopolyploid and one autopolyploid plant species.
Peggy Fong
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether the order of human impacts changes the resistance of short algal turf communities, by sequentially applying increased fishing pressure, added nutrients and added sedimentation in all possible orders in reef plots at Moorea, French Polynesia.
The school
University of California-Davis: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 647 research doctorates a year.
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