Benjamin Tumolo
Northern Michigan University, MI·Ecology & Evolution
Ecologists usually focus on species competing or eating each other, but species also help one another. In facilitation, one species changes a habitat in ways that help others survive and reproduce.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
facilitation
positive species interactions
stress-gradient hypothesis
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2029
What they work on
- Measure how aquatic insect functional traits and environmental context together shape the strength of facilitation, using a coordinated experiment run at multiple locations across the US.
- Examine how environmental context affects the spatial scaling of interactions between facilitator and beneficiary species, using fish assemblage models across thousands of North American streams.
- Pull together global evidence on how traits and scale relate to positive species interactions, using meta-analysis that measures lasting facilitation legacies, to test the stress-gradient hypothesis.
More about the research
The stress-gradient hypothesis predicts that such help matters more as conditions get harsher. Results often depend on context, though. Freshwater ecosystems are both highly threatened and understudied, so knowing when helpful interactions matter is important there.
Why it matters
Freshwater ecosystems are threatened out of proportion to their size. Knowing when species help one another could improve how managers protect them. The grant notes that revealing roles of positive interactions could increase productivity and yields in fisheries and aquaculture. Open, AI-ready datasets could support future freshwater research.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jonathan Walter
University of California-Davis, CA·Ecology & Evolution
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.
Christopher Swan
University of Maryland-Baltimore County, MD·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether demographic stochasticity, random variation in births, deaths and local extinctions, shapes community assembly more strongly in tropical streams than temperate ones, given temperature-dependent differences in population growth rates and densities.
Erica Stuber
Utah State University, UT·Ecology & Evolution·Early-career
Characterize the scales of effect, meaning the spatial extents at which species respond to environmental features, for hundreds of North American breeding birds, using multi-scale analyses of a large citizen-science observation database.
The school
Northern Michigan University: 1 labs on PI Pages.
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