Serguei Saavedra
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA·Ecology & Evolution
Every living thing needs energy, and ecological communities, groups of interacting populations in one place and time, both depend on and reshape the energy and resources around them. These feedbacks can strengthen or weaken the planet's life-support systems.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
community ecology
ecological communities
energy limits
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Build mathematical models of how ecological and evolutionary processes set energy limits, such as intake, productivity, efficiency and storage, in feasible versus unfeasible ecological communities.
- Determine whether organism-level energy limits described by metabolic scaling theory carry over to whole communities, or whether community feasibility constrains organisms' energy limits instead, using theoretical models.
- Identify when co-evolutionary pressures on traits such as body mass and life span raise or lower the feasible energy limits of communities, and how communities tolerate random changes in energy supply.
More about the research
Metabolic scaling theory explains energy limits for individual organisms, but it is unclear whether those limits carry over to whole communities, or whether community-level conditions instead constrain individual organisms. This project asks what energy limits allow a community to be feasible, meaning all its species can persist, and therefore sustainable.
Why it matters
Knowing the energy limits that keep ecological communities feasible could help conservation and restoration managers. It could help them predict which communities can persist, how they will respond to disturbances, and how community makeup and environmental conditions may change. That understanding is a basis for designing successful interventions to protect or rebuild ecosystems.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Justin Pomeranz
Colorado Mesa University, CO·Ecology & Evolution
Describe how body-size distributions, measured by the power-law exponent λ, vary across U.S. streams and rivers sampled by the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON).
Rafael D'Andrea
Stony Brook University, NY·Ecology & Evolution
Build a trait-based multispecies competition model for soil bacteria in which species take up carbon sources at temperature-dependent rates and exchange byproducts through cross-feeding.
Mark Haussmann
Bucknell University, PA·Ecology & Evolution
Identify the molecular, cellular and whole-body performance traits that explain why some Leach's storm-petrels show the expected trade-off between reproducing and surviving while others escape it, guided by a 70-year population record.
The school
Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 25 labs on PI Pages, $1.1B a year on research, 692 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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