Benjamin Zuckerberg
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Ecology & Evolution
Where birds live depends on the shape of their habitat: how tall the trees are, how layered the understory is, and how patchy the vegetation is across a landscape. Most studies have looked only at tree canopy height and only over small areas.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
avian diversity
birds
biodiversity
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Test how taxonomic and functional bird diversity relate to 3-D vegetation structure, including vertical and horizontal variation, measured by airborne and spaceborne LiDAR together with bird sighting data.
- Identify bird traits that mediate how diversity responds to vegetation structure, using trait-environment analyses, to find traits that best predict future diversity under habitat change.
- Determine how relationships between bird diversity and vegetation change across spatial scales from local communities to the continent, advancing theory on scale dependence.
More about the research
Yet human activity and natural disturbance are reshaping habitats everywhere. Predicting what happens to biodiversity requires knowing how full three-dimensional (3-D) habitat structure shapes bird communities, from a single site up to a whole continent.
Why it matters
Habitat loss and modification threaten bird diversity. Identifying which aspects of vegetation structure and which bird traits drive diversity patterns could help land managers and conservation planners. It could help them predict how disturbance will affect bird communities and plan for the future of ecosystems facing human impacts.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Marta Jarzyna
Ohio State University, OH·Ecology & Evolution
Test how three-dimensional vegetation structure, including vertical and horizontal variation, relates to the taxonomic and functional diversity of birds. The work combines bird sighting data with airborne and spaceborne LiDAR.
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.
Elizabeth LaRue
University of Texas at El Paso, TX·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether higher tree species richness increases belowground biodiversity and thereby promotes complementary use of water and nutrients, using North America's longest-running large-scale forest biodiversity experiment.
The school
University of Wisconsin-Madison: 91 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 854 research doctorates a year.
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