Karen Abbott
Case Western Reserve University, OH·Ecology & Evolution
Populations of insects, trees or crops in distant places sometimes rise and fall together, a pattern called spatial synchrony. Explaining why this happens is hard.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Mathematics & Statistics
Physics
- Topics
spatial synchrony
population dynamics
Ising model
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Apply Ising universality, a statistical-physics idea that simple aligned-state models capture many systems' behavior, to ecological data coarse-grained into a few population states, to study synchrony independent of system details.
- Use machine learning on remotely sensed orchard data to uncover how real patterns of synchrony arise across space and over multiple time scales.
- Build mechanistic models of intermediate complexity that link the Ising description to the machine-learning results, to validate and improve both approaches.
- Predict which features of ecological systems promote or prevent spatial synchrony, with attention to transient dynamics and robustness to noisy data.
More about the research
Ecological data are often noisy and coarse, and real systems may spend much of their time in temporary (transient) states rather than settling into long-run behavior. Understanding what drives synchrony matters more as a changing climate reshapes ecosystems. It is also relevant to conservation, agriculture and public health.
Why it matters
Knowing what makes populations fluctuate in step across a landscape could improve conservation planning and agricultural practice, for example in orchard management. It could also help predict how ecosystems respond to a changing climate. Universal rules for how spatial patterns form may also offer insight in public health, where synchrony and spatial spread matter.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Briget Eastep
Western Colorado University, CO·Ecology & Evolution
Develop, implement and assess adaptive management strategies for public lands, designing interventions as experiments to measure their effects on species and ecosystems.
Jonathan Walter
University of California-Davis, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Test how plant functional traits, the physical, physiological and seasonal features of species, influence population and community synchrony, using multi-site time series from the global Nutrient Network grassland experiment.
Robert Van Woesik
Florida Institute of Technology, FL·Ecology & Evolution
Quantify differences in coral recovery rates after thermal-stress events worldwide using spatio-temporal Bayesian models, which estimate how recovery varies across both place and time.
The school
Case Western Reserve University: 34 labs on PI Pages, $643M a year on research, 213 research doctorates a year.
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