ROBIN SNYDER, PHD
Assistant Professor of Biology
Research Interests
One of the big unsolved questions in ecology is "How can species that compete for the same resources coexist?" Consider plants. All plants require sunlight, water, and various underground minerals. If one plant were best at acquiring all of these resources, it would outcompete all of the other species, eventually becoming the only plant in the region. Of course, it's extremely unlikely that such a champion plant could exist. There are usually tradeoffs involved, so that becoming more efficient at obtaining one resource, such as light, makes an individual less efficient at obtaining another resource, such as nitrogen. It's also true that plants require nutrients in different proportions, so that one species can be limited by its ability to obtain nitrogen, while another is phosphorus-limited, for example. However, tradeoffs and resource partitioning are not enough to explain the numbers of species that we see coexisting. For this reason, many ecologists are studying coexistence mechanisms that arise out of some form of variation, whether it's temporal or spatial variation in the environment or variation that arises from population processes themselves.
I study the ways in which temporal variation in the environment (like weather) and spatial variation in the environment (like different soil types) interact with local processes like dispersal (seeds getting carried away by wind or animals), competition, and herbivory to create new mechanisms of species coexistence. (By "local" I mean that individuals interact more strongly with their immediate neighborhood than with more distant locations.) I usually think in terms of plants, but the insights that come from this work are actually quite general. As someone who likes to work with spatially extended dynamical systems, I'm particularly interested in how the relative spatial and temporal scales of environmental variation and biological processes affect coexistence. What happens if seeds disperse over a shorter distance than that over which plants typically compete? (Many specialized dispersers have gone extinct, so this is more common than you might think.) Are some spatial scales or temporal scales of environmental variability more effective at promoting coexistence than others? What biological processes determine those scales, and how?
I use mathematics to explore these questions. Simple mathematical models are useful in ecology because they can be far more general than an experiment. They can give us insights into what may be happening across different biological systems and can give us tips as to what would be the most useful experiments to perform next. On the other hand, if you want the details, you have to do an experiment. Mathematical models are like Zen paintings, in which a few deft brush strokes give us the curve of a cat's back, sitting by a window. Field studies and lab experiments are like photographs, which tell us what color the coat is and whether it is dusty. I try to do most of my work with paper and pencil, since that yields the most general answers. However, computers are useful for testing how well my approximations hold and for exploring systems that are too complicated to investigate just with paper-and-pencil math.
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