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Moorcroft Named Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
Cambridge, Mass. - November 16, 2007 - Ecologist Paul R. Moorcroft, whose research examines how ecological interactions between organisms give rise to the dynamics of populations and ecosystems, has been appointed professor of organismic and evolutionary biology in Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, effective Jan. 1, 2007.
Moorcroft, 38, was previously associate professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard, where he has been on the faculty since 2001.
"Professor Moorcroft's work in ecosystem dynamics and predictive modeling is well ahead of its time, with the power to solve previously intractable problems," says Jeremy Bloxham, dean for the life sciences in FAS. "His highly original scholarship in these areas has brought him growing influence in the field of ecosystem ecology, and he is known on campus for his clear, engaging, and intellectually enlightening lectures."
Moorcroft's research seeks to understand how the properties and interactions of the organisms within ecological systems affect their patterns and dynamics at larger scales. His primary area of research is predicting the response of terrestrial ecosystems to global environmental change.
Conventional ecosystem models use a "canopy as big-leaf" assumption, holding that an ecosystem's response to a change in the physical environment can be extrapolated from average canopy plants experiencing average resource conditions. In reality, terrestrial ecosystems are highly heterogeneous, consisting of different kinds of plants that compete with their neighbors for access to light, water, and nutrient resources. The existence of these localized (and non-linear) competitive interactions between individual plants can result in an ecosystem's response to a change in the physical environment being vastly different than that predicted by a "canopy as big-leaf" ecosystem model.
Using approaches similar to those used in statistical physics to predict the dynamics of interacting particles, Moorcroft has developed a new generation of terrestrial ecosystem models, in which the response of an ecosystem to a change in the physical environment is formally derived from the responses of individual plants to the environmental change modulated by the local competitive interactions between neighboring plants. His group has subsequently shown that this formal approach to scaling plant-level responses into ecosystem-level responses yields ecosystem models with far greater predictive power, and thus improved confidence in their ability to forecast how terrestrial ecosystems will respond to changes in climate, rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and other forms of long-term environmental change.
Moorcroft is currently collaborating on a project that is using this new modeling approach to analyze the stability of the Amazon tropical forests to habitat modification, climate change, and rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The project is expected to help scientists better understand humans' impact on this highly diverse ecosystem and to help policymakers develop meaningful solutions for preservation.
A second area of Moorcroft's research, stemming from his doctoral thesis work, is analyzing the relationship between animal movement behavior and the home range patterns found within animal populations. His study of animal populations aims to explain the spatial distribution of individuals across landscapes. Again drawing on approaches from statistical physics, he has developed an elegant and mathematically sophisticated framework for analyzing movement with empirical data provided by continual monitoring of animals' movements using radio and global positioning system tracking technologies. His recent book Mechanistic Home Range Analysis (Princeton University Press, 2006), co-authored with M. A. Lewis, presents a series of analyses of this kind for carnivore populations.
Moorcroft received his B.A. from Cambridge University in 1991 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1997. He was a research associate at the Princeton Environmental Institute from 1997 to 2001, when he joined Harvard as an assistant professor.
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