Justin Pomeranz
Colorado Mesa University, CO·Ecology & Evolution
In nearly every ecosystem, small organisms vastly outnumber large ones. This regular decline in numbers as body size increases is one of the most consistent patterns in ecology.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
size spectra
individual size distribution
community size spectrum
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2028
What they work on
- 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).
- Map continental patterns in metabolic scaling, trophic transfer efficiency and predator-to-prey mass ratio, and test how well an energy-based model using these factors explains observed body-size distributions.
- Identify the environmental and ecological drivers of energy flow in stream food webs, and release permanently archived data and code from body-size analyses across the United States.
More about the research
It also offers a way to gauge how efficiently energy flows from plants and algae up the food web to top predators. That energy flow supports the clean water, food and recreation that people get from streams and rivers. Measuring it directly across many different ecosystems is hard and slow. Body size, a trait every organism has, offers a shortcut.
Why it matters
People rely on streams and rivers for drinking water, food and recreation, and these benefits depend on how energy moves through aquatic food webs. Identifying what drives body-size patterns across U.S. streams could strengthen the use of size distributions as a widely applicable indicator of ecosystem health. It could help managers judge how environmental conditions and human uses affect freshwater ecosystems.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Chris Funk
Colorado State University-Fort Collins, CO·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether cutthroat trout predators are more sensitive to rising water temperatures than their tailed frog tadpole prey, combining stream environment measurements, genomics and physiology experiments to measure heat adaptation.
Sydne Record
University of Maine, ME·Ecology & Evolution
Develop machine learning algorithms that automatically measure body traits of NEON beetle specimens from images, and test how well they work across different image types.
Steven Hall
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether variation in soil organic matter properties and cycling across U.S. ecosystems can be explained by three fundamental axes running from fast to slow biogeochemical rates, using samples and data from NEON sites.
The school
Colorado Mesa University: 1 labs on PI Pages.
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