Andrew R. Dyer
Ph.D. (Plant Ecology)
University of California, Davis, 1996

Room: SBDG 101E (Science Building)
Phone: (803) 641-3443

 

 

 

 

Research Interests

My research interests include

  1. scaling up from individual plant characteristics and interactions to ecosystem processes
  2. the influence of invasive species on plant interactions and resource dynamics at different environmental scales
  3. the influence of seasonal variation in resource availability on susceptibility of habitats to invasion
  4. the importance of ecotype formation vs. plasticity to the success of invasive species
  5. how the understanding of interactions at different spatial and temporal scales can be used in the conservation of native species and threatened habitats

Achieving these goals has been simplified somewhat by using annual species and annual-dominated communities in semi-arid habitats as the model experimental systems. Resource conditions in these communities are seasonally heterogeneous and can be manipulated to simulate either environmental gradients or changing climate conditions. This has facilitated the investigation into many questions from adaptive plant responses to the interactions between community composition and spatial and temporal resource heterogeneity. As a consequence, my research and publications have focused on a several inter-related topics within this field.

Previous research has been conducted in grassland habitats of California and in stabilized dune communities in Israel, two ecosystems that share similar climates and many congeneric and conspecific plants. These experiments have addressed fundamental topics in community and ecosystem ecology: To what extent are plant communities structured by abiotic environmental factors rather than by biotic interactions (i.e., by so-called Wallacian vs Darwinian forces)? As resource availability and productivity change, either along environmental gradients or by climate change, are resource-based or competition-based models more likely to describe plant interactions and large scale shifts in vegetation? Are concepts such as plant functional types useful for predicting community succession trajectories and future conditions at the ecosystem level?

Integrating from one scale to higher scales of organization is the ultimate goal of ecology, but mechanistic experimentation has nearly always been conducted at the plant-plant interaction level. I have been fortunate to work on projects that have taken unique approaches toward understanding the process of scaling up from the individual plant to the entire community. In Israel, our research includes the novel aspect of manipulating entire plant communities while maintaining proportional representation of individual species. This allows the measurement of changes in competitive relationships at both individual and community levels across the productivity gradient. In addition to making predictions about the validity of broad statements concerning resource competition and community structure, we are able to address the validity of using plant-plant interaction experiments for scaling up to and predicting community-level competitive outcomes. The many papers that will emerge from these experiments are just entering the publication stage.

In collaborative work with colleagues in California, I am investigating changes in the molecular and quantitative genetics of invasive species native to the Mediterranean and Eurasia, with particular focus on annual grasses. This research compares adaptive variation in populations of weedy species to determine whether shifts in genetic variation and morphology can be correlated with invasive potential. Our interest lies not only in the community and ecosystem level effects of invasive species, but in identifying adaptive characteristics that enable successful invasion. This research had a strong applied as well as basic aspect; the conservation and restoration of natural habitats and their component species is of great interest, yet understanding the inherent evolutionary potential that enables exotic plant species to invade and dominate such systems is necessary and lacking.

Most recently, with my move to South Carolina, I have begun looking at the ecology of Carolina Bays, wetland areas that are hydrologically isolated and widely distributed in the woodlands throughout the southeast. In collaboration with the Savannah River Site and the Savannah River Ecological Laboratory (University of Georgia), I am hoping to use these well-studied wetlands to investigate the relationship between seasonal resource fluctuation and community invasibility. The first project has been to conduct a vegetation survey of a restored Carolina Bay after 9 years of regrowth to assess the success of the restoration effort in terms of species richness, diversity, and composition.

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Courses Taught  

ABIO 102 Introductory Biology (Biological Science II)

ABIO 370 Ecology and Evolution

ABIO 570 Principles of Ecology

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Vitae

 

University of South Carolina Aiken

Copyright © 2005 by the Board of Trustees of the University of South Carolina

Comments to billj@usca.edu 7.12.05

URL: http://www.usca.edu