William Petry
North Carolina State University, NC·Ecology & Evolution
Almost 90% of flowering plants rely on animals such as bees to carry pollen so they can make seeds, and pollinators are declining worldwide. Will plants decline along with them?
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Plant Science & Agriculture
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
pollination
pollinator decline
plant population dynamics
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2028
What they work on
- Experimentally amplify natural year-to-year variation in pollination for thousands of tagged perennial plants of two species, using increased, reduced and unmanipulated pollination treatments in a long-term field experiment.
- Build integral projection models, which project population change from individual survival, growth and reproduction, using 9–11 years of plant demography and pollinator abundance data.
- Identify which vital rates (survival, growth or reproduction) drive changes in plant population dynamics when pollinator abundance fluctuates, using model-based population projections.
- Test how the mean, variance and autocorrelation of pollinator abundance each affect plant population growth and persistence in a stochastic (randomly varying) environment.
More about the research
The answer is hard to see. Pollinator numbers, rainfall and other conditions swing from year to year. A plant that makes fewer seeds may even look healthier for a while, because it can put that saved energy into staying alive. That delay could hide the early warning signs of a plant population heading toward extinction. This project asks how plant populations persist when pollination varies randomly over time, and why some species are more at risk than others.
Why it matters
With pollinators declining worldwide, this work could help ecologists tell which flowering plant species are most at risk and spot hidden warning signs of plant decline before populations collapse. It adds understanding of how species interactions and random environmental swings together shape whether populations persist, which could inform conservation of plants that depend on animal pollinators.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
William Morris
Duke University, NC·Ecology & Evolution
Build and validate a climate- and fire-driven integral projection model for Venus flytraps, using demographic data from near-factorial manipulations of fire frequency, drought, and warming across longleaf pine savannas.
Evangeline Ballerini
California State University-Sacramento, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Describe nectar volume and chemistry in four Aquilegia species adapted to bees, hummingbirds or hawk moths, using developmental assays, transcriptomics and metabolomics.
Diane Thomson
Scripps College, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Quantify correlations among weather metrics and test whether they are changing over time, using 17–27-year demographic records of six California Channel Islands plant species and one mainland species.
The school
North Carolina State University: 40 labs on PI Pages, $717M a year on research, 603 research doctorates a year.
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