Scientist looking into ecological systems is honoured

Canterbury scientist looking into ecological systems is honoured

A University of Canterbury scientist is researching ecological networks where people are placing ever increasing pressures on crucial ecological communities around the world.

Dr Daniel Stouffer is researching global ecology networks at Canterbury. He has an $800,000 Rutherford Discovery Fellowship looking at a theory of evolution in ecological networks and developing strategies to preserve ecological communities that form a key part of New Zealand's national identity and biological heritage.

He has been named an Early Career Fellow of the Ecological Society of America, the discipline's largest global organisation, for outstanding contributions in the field. He will attend a special event at the society’s annual meeting in Baltimore in August.

“Since we depend on communities to provide many of life's necessities such as clean air, clean water, food and recreation, it is essential that we understand what allows a community to be stable, how communities respond to change, and how to avoid ecological catastrophe going forward,” Dr Stouffer says.

“An ecological community is complex system where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. After all, we can be talking about thousands of species coexisting together.

“At the core of all of these issues are the networks of interactions between species that hold ecological communities together. My main research is about finding ways to disassemble complex interaction networks so we can figure out which species are the most vulnerable to disturbance or which species are the linchpin that should be protected at all costs.

“This research has direct real world importance from systems as different as maintaining the high economic value of our fisheries by avoiding collapse and making sure that we don't behave in a way that impacts whether pollinators can reach the many insect-pollinated crops that make up our agricultural sector.

“We can also quantify the full, community-wide impact of the arrival of invasive species. After all, the species that an invasive organism interacts with are only the tip of the iceberg. These impacts can easily cascade to the species those species interact with.

“Ecological networks demonstrate that almost all species are connected to each other either directly or via a single other species. This means that every ecological impact, even if it seems to affect a single species, is actually the whole community's problem and needs to be studied in this way,” Dr Stouffer says.

ENDS

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