Cesar Uribe
Rice University, TX·Ecology & Evolution
Food webs, the networks of who eats whom, help hold ecosystems together. Most have been studied in single places, which makes it hard to predict how climate change and land use will reshape them across whole regions.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Engineering
Computer Science
- Topics
food webs
ecological networks
predator-prey interactions
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Determine how climate and habitat fragmentation influence vegetation productivity, the rate plants convert sunlight into plant material, across sub-Saharan African mammal habitats.
- Track how local mammal food webs in five African protected areas respond to changes in productivity and fragmentation over time, using standardized yearly camera-trap data.
- Measure how food web structure varies with productivity and fragmentation across 170 mammal communities, using topological data analysis, a mathematical method for comparing network shapes.
- Develop fast, open-source algorithms with tutorials for measuring differences between food webs across space and time.
More about the research
In sub-Saharan Africa, plant productivity strongly predicts mammal diversity, and the human population is projected to grow fast. This project asks what drives the structure of African mammal food webs over space and time.
Why it matters
Africa's mammal communities face fast changes in climate and land use. Knowing how productivity and habitat fragmentation reshape predator-prey networks could help conservation planners anticipate which communities are most at risk. Open-source tools for comparing food webs could also help ecologists elsewhere study networks more rigorously.
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.
Pete Guiden
Hamilton College, NY·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether overabundant white-tailed deer indirectly simplify rodent communities, narrow rodent diets and raise Lyme disease prevalence in northeastern US forests, using deer exclosure fences and unfenced controls.
Justin Pomeranz
Colorado Mesa University, CO·Ecology & Evolution
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).
The school
Rice University: 24 labs on PI Pages, $278M a year on research, 267 research doctorates a year.
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