Walter Jetz
Assistant Professor of Biology, UCSD

e-mail: wjetz@ucsd.edu
lab homepage

     I am interested in the way environment, evolutionary history and chance affect ecological patterns at the level of the individual, population and community and how these then combine to form patterns at the scale of continents or the whole globe. Recent advances in bio- and geoinformatics, ecological theory, and data availability now provide an unprecedented opportunity to tackle broad-scale patterns from an individual, mechanistic perspective.

     I am taking two approaches to these new challenges. First, I scrutinize continental and global-scale ecological patterns to statistically test focal hypotheses. Second, I attempt to predict and test these patterns from processes acting at the level of the individual. Patterns of interest currently include individual energy needs and space use, occurrence (and richness) of species at multiple scales, geographic range size and threat of extinction, effects of climate change.

     I feel that the documenting and understanding of broad-scale ecological patterns is inextricably linked to conservation and consequentially my work usually has a strong applied component. Focal groups of study are terrestrial vertebrates, in particular birds and mammals. At finer geographic scales I am an avid field ornithologist and am keen to start observational and experimental field projects on the ecology of birds, linking broad scale hypotheses to patterns on the ground.

     McKechnie, A.E., Freckleton, R.P. and Jetz, W. (2006). Phenotypic plasticity in the scaling of avian basal metabolic rate. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: 273: 931-937.

     Anderson, K.J., Jetz, W. (2005): The broad-scale ecology of energy expenditure of endotherms. Ecology Letters.

     Jetz, W., Carbone, C., Fulford, J. & J. H. Brown (2004): The scaling of animal space use. Science 306: 266-268.
 
     Jetz, W., Rahbek, C. & R.K. Colwell (2004): The coincidence of rarity and richness and the potential signature of history in centers of endemism. Ecology Letters 7: 1180-1191.

      Jetz, W. & Rahbek, C. (2002): Geographic range size and determinants of species richness in African birds. Science 297: 1548-1551.

      Walter received his MSc and DPhil from the University of Oxford, UK, where he was supervised by Prof. P.H. Harvey. He then joined the lab of James H. Brown at the University of New Mexico, then was a postdoctoral fellow in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at Princeton University. He joined the faculty at UCSD as Assistant Professor in Ecology in December 2004.