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Writing: Knowing your warblers Teaching: Community Ecology Best time for a meeting: T,W,Th afternoons Traveling: Konza Prairie field trip for Community Ecology Reading: Hard Boiled Wonderland, Haruki Murakami The Histories, Herodotus Watching: Very little lately Listening: Haydn Symphonies. Pandora.com |
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| We focus on the behavior, function, and biogeography of soil arthropods. Toward that end we use gradients of temperature, NPP, and biogeochemistry to predict the abundance and function of brown (or detrital) food webs. Consider that most of a tropical forest’s leaves feed the microbes of the brown food web. The BFW is home to about 60% of tropical biodiversity and regulates nutrient recycling and carbon storage. Every part and process of the BFW—decomposition rates, nutrient concentration, biomass and abundance--varies 10 to 100-fold at grains of 1 square meter, so there is a lot to explain. We use a variety of theory--metabolic, trophic, stoichiometric, and aggregative--to search for general mechanisms underlying global ecological patterns. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Summer 08 Spring 2008 2007 Timeless |
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| Photo by Christien Ziegler | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Paraponera clavata, the bullet ant, ca. life size. Pen and inks on this page by Deborah Cotter Kaspari.
If you have scrolled down this far, check out the occasional advice from the oxymoronically titled Getting Things Done in Academia. |
This page was built and maintained with support from the National Science Foundation | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Author: mkaspari at ou.edu |
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