Christopher Swan
University of Maryland-Baltimore County, MD·Ecology & Evolution
Freshwater ecosystems are among the systems most exposed to global change, yet predicting their response requires three things: knowing how the ecosystem works, knowing how climate shifts translate into ecological shifts, and being able to project those relationships into future climates. One underappreciated factor is chance.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
Biology
- Topics
stream ecology
freshwater ecosystems
macroinvertebrates
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Test whether demographic stochasticity, random variation in births, deaths and local extinctions, shapes community assembly more strongly in tropical streams than temperate ones, given temperature-dependent differences in population growth rates and densities.
- Determine how the balance between demographic stochasticity and environmental selection depends on the interaction among network position, community size and dispersal, using surveys of resident and dispersing stream macroinvertebrates.
- Test whether more stochastic assembly, in tropical streams and in dispersal-limited headwaters, produces greater variability in functional composition, the mix of ecological roles present in a community.
- Conduct parallel intensive surveys at multiple positions in river networks in the US and Brazil, then use modeling to extrapolate the North-versus-South comparison to future climate scenarios.
More about the research
Small communities are made of small populations, and small populations have more variable birth, death and local extinction rates. That variability can ripple outward into how the whole ecosystem functions.
Why it matters
Managing or mitigating global change in rivers and streams requires knowing how climate shifts translate into changes in ecosystem function. By linking community size, network position and chance to functional diversity across temperate and tropical streams, the work could improve forecasts of how freshwater ecosystems respond to warming, informing conservation and water management decisions.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Albert Ruhi
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Ecology & Evolution·Early-career
Identify what controls metacommunity stability in streams, focusing on drought-driven dispersal limits and population synchrony, using long-term monitoring and field experiments in an intermittent river network in Pinnacles National Park.
Tomas Carlo
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Ecology & Evolution
Test how fruit selection and seed dispersal by frugivores interact with the functional traits and phylogenetic relatedness of pioneer plants to shape community assembly in early-successional tropical forest, using a replicated field experiment.
Justin Pomeranz
Colorado Mesa University, CO·Ecology & Evolution
Describe how body-size distributions, measured by the power-law exponent λ, vary across U.S. streams and rivers sampled by the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON).
The school
University of Maryland-Baltimore County: 7 labs on PI Pages, $151M a year on research, 90 research doctorates a year.
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