People
Keith Clay
Biography (PDF)
Research Funding (PDF)
Director, IU Research and Teaching Preserve
Current Lab Members
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Angie Shelton
Angie Shelton
I am broadly interested in research questions within plant ecology and plant-herbivore interactions. My research combines field work, laboratory and greenhouse experiments, and computational modeling.
Previous projects include the interaction between the distribution on chemical defenses in plants and behavior of insect herbivores, and phenotypic plasticity as a mechanism for sessile plants to cope with stochastic and predictable environmental variation. My current projects include the impact of periodical cicada emergences on forest trees (with Keith Clay), developing spatially-explicit predictive models of invasive Japanese stiltgrass using GIS (with Luke Flory and Dan Johnson and others), and examining patterns of plant diversity across different spatial scales (with Heather Reynolds and Karen Haubensak).
Luke Flory
S. Luke Flory
My research is at the interface of basic and applied ecology, combining questions about the process of plant invasions with the impacts of invasions and restoration of invaded systems. In recent work I have examined the invasibility of forest communities along roads, the management of an exotic grass invasion, and the response of host plants to periodical cicada oviposition damage. Currently, I am evaluating the response of forest communities to invasion by the exotic grass Microstegium vimineum and the role of landscape characteristics and land-use history in determining the distribution of Microstegium and its impacts on forest regeneration.
Website: mypage.iu.edu/~sflory
Anna Larimer
Anna Larimer
Fungal endophytes and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are common symbionts of most terrestrial plants. Both endophytes and AMF span a continuum of interactions with their hosts ranging from highly mutualistic to highly parasitic. I am interested in this continuum, especially how aspects of the biotic environment influence the nature of an interaction. Currently, I am utilizing a plant-endophyte, plant-AMF system to understand the effects of additional symbionts (having varying interactions) on host plant performance.
Dan Johnson
Dan Johnson
My interests are in the patterns of species co-existence and the processes that create those patterns. My study system is the deciduous forests of the Eastern United States. I am interested in investigating these patterns across multiple scales and the anthropogenic effects on these patterns and processes.
David Civitello
David Civitello
I am interested in the endosymbiotic microbes associated with hard ticks. Ticks are notorious for transmitting several pathogenic microbes to humans, but they also harbor other microbial species. These microbes have little, no, or undocumented human pathogenicity and their function in the tick is unclear. My research interests are to combine field and laboratory experiments with molecular tools to investigate the roles of these interesting microbes. Understanding how diverse endosymbiont communities form and persist, and their impact on common tick species are increasingly important goals as tick and vertebrate host populations expand and cases of tick-borne diseases continue to increase.
Collin Hobbs
Collin Hobbs
I am interested in metapopulation dynamics and intraspecific variation of plants.
Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) is a rare conifer in the state of Indiana, found only in small, scattered, isolated stands of high density that are disjunct from the main range of the species. As such, eastern hemlock and its associated community type can be considered an excellent island-mainland biogeographic system and is a candidate for further metapopulation/metacommunity studies. Currently I am collaborating with Dan Johnson as we create a high resolution map of all known eastern hemlock populations in Indiana. This is the first step towards further research of this system in which I will use techniques borrowed from molecular genetics to study metapopulation dynamics and inter-population variation.