Morgan Ernest
University of Florida, FL·Ecology & Evolution
Ecosystems are changing, and land managers and policy makers need forecasts of how they will change next. Such forecasts are hard to make because ecosystems depend on complex interactions among species and their environment.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Mathematics & Statistics
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
ecological forecasting
Portal Project
long-term ecological research
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Nov 2029
What they work on
- Assess how novel conditions, including a warmer, drier climate and experimentally created species combinations, affect the ability to forecast mammal population sizes at the long-term Portal Project site in Arizona.
- Test whether forecasting models with more ecological complexity predict mammal populations better than simpler models, using decades of Portal Project monitoring data.
- Determine whether data from long-term field experiments improve ecological forecasts, and whether forecasting models can handle rapid environmental change.
- Continue collecting mammal and plant data and run an automated forecasting system, releasing an open dataset and online teaching materials for ecological forecasting.
More about the research
When conditions shift into territory never seen before, knowledge from the past may predict the future poorly. Testing how well forecasts hold up under these novel conditions is a central open problem in ecology.
Why it matters
Land managers and policy makers need reliable predictions of how ecosystems will change as climates warm and dry. By testing which forecasting methods work when conditions become novel, this work could guide how ecological forecasts are built and used in decisions. Its open long-term dataset gives other researchers a resource for developing and checking their own forecasts.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
William Morris
Duke University, NC·Ecology & Evolution
Build and validate a climate- and fire-driven integral projection model for Venus flytraps, using demographic data from near-factorial manipulations of fire frequency, drought, and warming across longleaf pine savannas.
Cayelan Carey
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Ecology & Evolution
Test how far ahead physical, chemical and biological variables in two drinking-water reservoirs can be predicted, by iteratively evaluating real-time forecasts made by competing models against new monitoring data.
Peter Adler
Utah State University, UT·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether community-environment disequilibrium, the gap between the climate a community suits and the one it experiences, reduces primary productivity, weakens resistance to biological invasion, and lowers pollination services, using novel combinations of existing long-term datasets.
The school
University of Florida: 65 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 795 research doctorates a year.
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