Pete Guiden
Hamilton College, NY·Ecology & Evolution
Species affect each other not only by eating one another but also indirectly. One species can reshape another's habitat and change how it behaves.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Biology
- Topics
white-tailed deer
rodents
small mammals
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Test whether overabundant white-tailed deer indirectly simplify rodent communities, narrow rodent diets and raise Lyme disease prevalence in northeastern US forests, using deer exclosure fences and unfenced controls.
- Test whether deer browsing, by removing the shrub layer that shelters rodents, makes rodents warier of predators and less active, using combinations of deer and predator exclosures.
- Track tree seedlings growing from seed inside and outside deer and rodent exclosures to measure how rodents and deer, alone and together, shape plant diversity and forest regeneration.
More about the research
These indirect effects can matter as much as predation or herbivory, but they are much harder to measure. Better ways to measure them would help ecologists forecast how species interact and help landowners manage land more efficiently. This project asks how white-tailed deer, a common and often overabundant large herbivore, indirectly shape the numbers and behavior of rodents in northeastern US forests by changing rodent habitat.
Why it matters
Overabundant deer reshape forests across the northeastern US. Understanding how they indirectly alter rodents, predator–prey relationships and tree regeneration could improve forest management principles, helping state conservation agencies and landowners. Links between deer, rodents and ticks may also clarify how Lyme disease prevalence varies across forests.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Cesar Uribe
Rice University, TX·Ecology & Evolution
Determine how climate and habitat fragmentation influence vegetation productivity, the rate plants convert sunlight into plant material, across sub-Saharan African mammal habitats.
Chris Funk
Colorado State University-Fort Collins, CO·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether cutthroat trout predators are more sensitive to rising water temperatures than their tailed frog tadpole prey, combining stream environment measurements, genomics and physiology experiments to measure heat adaptation.
Candace Mathiason
Colorado State University-Fort Collins, CO·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine the safety and immune effectiveness in white-tailed deer of two CWD vaccines, one targeting misfolded prion protein (PrPSc) and one removing the normal protein that prions convert, alone and combined.
The school
Hamilton College: 1 labs on PI Pages, $4M a year on research.
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