Walter Jetz
I
am Associate
Professor in Biology (Section
of Ecology, Behavior & Evolution)
at the
University of California, San Diego.
Before taking up this position I have been a postdoctoral research fellow in the EEB Department
at Princeton University and the Brown Lab at the
University of New Mexico.
I am interested in the way environment, evolutionary history and chance
affect ecological patterns at the level of the individual and 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. Focal groups of study are terrestrial
vertebrates, in particular birds and mammals.
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 extinction risk, effects of climate change.
The documentation and understanding of broad scale ecological patterns is inextricably linked to conservation. Consequently, my work usually has a strong applied component.
