Jonathan Myers
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Ecology & Evolution
Moving from the poles toward the equator, the number of species rises sharply, and this pattern is especially striking in trees. A forest plot of 0.25 square kilometers holds about 10 tree species in subarctic Canada but more than 1,200 in the Amazon.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Plant Science & Agriculture
Chemistry
- Topics
latitudinal diversity gradient
tree diversity
biodiversity
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2027
What they work on
- Determine how leaf secondary chemistry, the defense compounds that are not needed for basic growth, shapes local interactions among neighboring trees, by combining leaf metabolomics with growth and survival data from mapped forest plots.
- Test how the effects of leaf chemistry on neighbor interactions change across latitude and climate, using 20 ForestGEO plots that range from boreal Canada to the Amazon.
- Measure how much chemical differences between species help maintain tree diversity across climates, using neighborhood demographic models and theoretical simulations.
- Collect and analyze leaves of 1,367 species from 7 new forest plots, and build a public metabolome database covering more than 2,000 tree species.
More about the research
A long-standing idea is that tropical plants are shaped mainly by their enemies, such as plant-eating insects and disease-causing microbes. In this view, plants evolve chemical defenses and their enemies evolve ways around them. If this arms race runs faster in the tropics, tropical tree species should differ more in their chemistry, which could help many species live side by side. This idea has gone largely untested at large scales because plant chemistry is so diverse that it has been hard to measure.
Why it matters
This work tests a central explanation for why the tropics hold so many more tree species than cooler regions, a basic question about how Earth's biodiversity is maintained. A public database of leaf chemistry for more than 2,000 tree species, most of them little-studied tropical trees, will be a resource for ecologists. These data will also support future research at national ecological monitoring networks.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Stefan Schnitzer
Marquette University, WI·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether lianas (woody vines) act as a keystone guild that keeps dominant tree species from crowding out weaker ones, using a large-scale liana-removal experiment in a tropical forest running since 2008.
Frank Jones
Oregon State University, OR·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether feedback between adult trees and same-species seedlings shifts from negative to positive as drought and nutrient stress increase, mediated by fungal pathogens and mutualists.
Paulo Brando
Yale University, CT·Ecology & Evolution
Extend a 21-year record of tree growth, mortality, biomass, canopy cover, soil moisture and forest–atmosphere carbon and water exchange at Tanguro, Brazil, to 27 years, to track recovery after repeated fire, drought and windthrow.
The school
Washington University in St Louis: 97 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 365 research doctorates a year.
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