Dr. Chris Steiner earns three years of research support from NSF to study metacommunity stability

Populations of species are often adversely affected by sudden and sometimes, even transient changes to their environments. The question that arises is how do we find persistent communities in nature, rather than barren wastelands?

Dr. Chris Steiner has been studying this basic problem in ecology by looking at it from a higher perspective. Populations may actually be connected to each other, by species dispersal, forming metapopulations. Movements of species among populations may facilitate rapid evolution, allowing populations to adapt to environmental change and potentially stabilizing the dynamics of whole ecological communities.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has recently granted three years of support to Dr. Steiner to study how species dispersal and rapid adaptation affect the stability and dynamics of planktonic communities experiencing environmental variability. Congratulations to Dr. Steiner on this research program.