Seth Newsome
University of New Mexico, NM·Ecology & Evolution
In deserts, rain arrives in short pulses that trigger brief bursts of plant growth, followed by long stretches of scarcity. How do animals, their gut microbes and whole food webs cope with this boom-and-bust cycle?
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
stable isotope analysis
compound-specific isotope analysis
gut microbiome
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Apr 2031
What they work on
- Test whether gut microbes in wild banner-tailed kangaroo rats make essential amino acids and short-chain fatty acids that hosts absorb, using compound-specific isotope tracing and metatranscriptomics.
- Determine whether diet specialization, microbial nutrient supply and physiological condition predict survival across three years of seasonal sampling, using mechanistic survival models.
- Quantify how small mammals use fast forb-based and slow shrub-based energy channels across seasons and ENSO cycles, combining stable isotopes and dietary DNA metabarcoding.
- Use individual diet profiles to test dynamic food-web models and machine learning analyses of how rainfall pulses shape consumer populations and food-web stability.
- Build the ISOVERSE open-source R packages (isoreader, isoprocessor, isoconnector, isoexplorer) to make stable isotope data processing efficient, transparent and reproducible.
More about the research
The lab's projects track who eats what using stable isotopes. These are naturally occurring variants of elements that act as chemical signatures of diet and nutrient sources. The work spans gut microbes in individual rodents, long-term food webs in a semiarid ecosystem, and open-source software for handling isotope data.
Why it matters
Understanding how deserts respond to droughts and extreme rain could inform responses to desertification and help land managers predict ecosystem change as climate becomes more variable. Insight into how gut microbes supply nutrients during scarcity adds basic knowledge of host-microbe partnerships, with analytical tools that biomedical sciences may adopt. Open isotope software could make data analysis faster and more reproducible in fields from ecology to nutrition and forensics.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Collaborative Research: LTREB Renewal: Experimental determination of trophic dynamics and energy flows in a semiarid habitat
NSF · May 2026 – Apr 2031
Collaborative Research: Linking gut microbiota to host nutrient dynamics, physiological performance, and survival in a resource-limited ecosystem
NSF · Feb 2027 – Jan 2030
Collaborative Research: Innovative Resources: Into the ISOVERSE - open-source data tools for efficient, transparent, and reproducible processing of stable isotope data
NSF · Sep 2024 – Aug 2027
Closest labs
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George Washington University, DC·Ecology & Evolution
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Catherine Davis
North Carolina State University, NC·Earth & Environmental Science
Measure which particle types planktic foraminifera collected off U.S. coasts gather, how quickly they clump them, and how this changes the sinking and carbon export of marine snow, using laboratory cultures.
The school
University of New Mexico: 27 labs on PI Pages, $355M a year on research, 182 research doctorates a year.
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