Dr. Joe A. LaManna

My research explores the potential importance of biotic interactions to environment-diversity relationships and ecosystem function. The importance of biotic interactions to these processes has been a longstanding hypothesis in ecology. However, substantial uncertainty remains regarding the role of biotic interactions in determining population and community responses to environmental change. To address these critical knowledge gaps, my research program that seeks to understand: (1) the importance of biotic interactions to population/community responses to environmental change; and (2) how ecological disturbances and biotic interactions combine to induce feedbacks and tipping points that determine ecosystem function and resilience. I also have active interdisciplinary collaborations with social, political, and economic scientists to uncover how interactions among social and environmental components drive socio-ecological resilience. My research explores the roles of species interactions in shaping community assembly, population dynamics, ecosystem function, and biodiversity in forest ecosystems. I am interested in interactions across trophic levels as well as the ecological and evolutionary roles of natural enemies like fungal pathogens and nest predators as well as mutualists like mycorrhizae. I am also interested in how local species interactions scale up to influence regional or biogeographic processes. I address critical gaps in knowledge with a combination of field-based experiments, large-scale observational studies, and a wide range of quantitative approaches including multivariate statistics, null modeling, and simulation models of population and community dynamics. I have worked with a variety of forest tree and avian communities in Oregon, Wisconsin, Montana, California, and Missouri. I have also led national and international collaborations using extensive datasets from the MAPS (Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survival) and the Smithsonian Forest Global Earth Observatory (ForestGEO) networks. My research program addresses these questions using a wide range of empirical (e.g. large-scale observational studies, field & greenhouse experiments) and quantitative approaches (e.g. spatially- and temporally-explicit analyses of large datasets, simulation models of population/community dynamics).

LaManna, J. A., F. A. Jones, D. M. Bell, R. J. Pabst, & D. C. Shaw. 2022. Tree species diversity increases with conspecific negative density dependence across an elevation gradient. Ecology Letters 25:1237–1249.