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Jeff Dukes
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Community, ecosystem, and global ecology, biodiversity and biological invasions, human interactions with ecosystems.
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I joined the Department of Biology at the University of Massachusetts Boston in January 2004. In August 2008, my lab will move to Purdue University, where I will join the Departments of Forestry and Natural Resources and Biological Sciences, and will participate in the Purdue Climate Change Research Center. If you are interested in joining my lab, please contact me by email.
2007:
November 19: Professor is plotting the path of global warming Daily News Tribune story about the BACE.
August 22: Guest on "Sunrise" on WUML-FM. Discussed the response of weeds to increasing atmospheric CO2 and climate change, the Boston-Area Climate Experiment, and other related topics. Link to podcast.
July 10: The BACE was featured on the 5 o'clock news on WCVB-TV Boston (Channel 5; ABC). You can read or view the story here.
June 21: Climate of the future? Boston Globe story about the BACE.
April 26: The Boston-Area Climate Experiment was featured on the 6 o'clock news on WBZ-TV Boston (Channel 4; CBS), as one installment of their "Project Mass.: Global Warming" series. You can read or view the story here.
April 22: On Earth Day 2007 the BACE opened its public exhibit area with displays on the topic of climate change.
March-April: Associated Press article on the pitfalls of palm oil appears in many newspapers.
March: Part of the BACE public exhibit was displayed at the 2007 New England Spring Flower Show at the Bayside Expo Center, where it attracted thousands of visitors, and won a Silver Medal from the Massachusetts Horticultural Society.
2006:
April: New NSF-funded project begins: The Boston-Area Climate Experiment (see below for details).
March: Interviewed for article on Salon.com.
January: Interview on biomass energy to appear on Sveriges Radio (Swedish Broadcasting Corporation).
2005:
September 5: PLoS Biology paper (released August 9) covered in BusinessWeek's "Developments to Watch."
August: Research included in "Counting Carbons" feature article in Discover Magazine. Article (may only be available to subscribers).
July 28: Another short interview appears on ABC affiliates, again via ScienCentral News. Video piece and extended interview.
Late May: Short interview on the origins of fossil fuels appeared on ABC affiliates around the United States. (Extended interview and video clip available from ScienCentral News.)
2004:
August 11: 30-minute interview on the program "Soundings" on KVMR-FM (northern California).
July 1: "Your Morning" on CN8 (Comcast's network television station for the Eastern U.S.).
March 6: Keynote speaker at the Species At Risk 2004 conference in Victoria, Canada.
March 6: Interview on the German Public Radio program "Forschung Aktuell" about parallels between plant invasions and computer viruses (interview entirely in German: 10:30am Eastern, 16:30 in Germany). The program is available online.
February 16: Several talks from a symposium at the AAAS annual meeting in Seattle, including Jeff's talk about the responses of a California annual grassland to global environmental changes, attracted the interest of the media. Jeff's work was covered by the BBC World Service, in the San Francisco Chronicle, Newsday, and on WBZ-AM Boston.
January 15: CNet News article about parallels between epidemics in the natural world and computer viruses (!).
January 8: Brief appearance discussing the origins of fossil fuels on BBC Radio 4's "Material World."
2003:
December 1: The paper "Burning buried sunshine" was named the fourth most popular science news story of 2003 by the EurekAlert! news service. This fall, the paper received coverage in The Economist, U.S. News and World Report, Science Magazine, and several other radio shows, print, and web outlets worldwide. Here are some links to the coverage.
November 28: The paper "Nitrogen and climate change" appeared in Science. The research results were covered by the BBC, in conjunction with results from a study of carbon exchange in Amazonian rainforest.
Hellmann, J.J., Byers, J.E., Bierwagen, B.G., Dukes, J.S. In press. Five potential consequences of climate change for invasive species. Conservation Biology.
Lee, H., II, Reusser, D.A., Olden, J.D., Smith, S.S., Graham, J., Burkett, V., Dukes, J.S., Piorkowski, R.J., McPhedran, J. In press. Integrated monitoring and information systems for managing aquatic invasive species in a changing climate. Conservation Biology.
Pyke, C.R., Thomas, R., Porter R.D., Hellmann, J., Dukes, J.S., Lodge, D., Chavarria, G In press. Climate change and invasive species policy: interactions, tensions, and synergies. Conservation Biology.
Amatangelo, K.L., Dukes, J.S., Field, C.B. 2008. Annual grassland responses to litter manipulation. Journal of Vegetation Science. Article in pdf.
Dukes, J.S., Shaw, M.R. 2007. Responses to changing atmosphere and climate. Pages 218-229 in: Ecology and Management of California Grasslands, Stromberg, M., Corbin, J., and D'Antonio, C., eds. University of California Press, Berkeley. Article in pdf.
Dukes, J.S. 2007. Tommorow's plant communities: Different, but how? New Phytologist 176: 235-237. Article in pdf.
Theoharides, K.A., Dukes, J.S. 2007. Plant invasion across space and time: factors affecting nonindigenous species success during four stages of invasion. New Phytologist 176: 256-273. Article in pdf.
Dukes, J.S. 2007. Fresh perspectives on timeless questions: Faculty response. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 5: 335.
Norby, R.J., Rustad, L.E., Dukes, J.S., Ojima, D.S., Parton, W.J., Del Grosso, S.J., McMurtrie, R.E., Pepper, D.A. 2007. Ecosystem responses to warming and interacting global change factors. Pages 45-58 in: Terrestrial Ecosystems in a Changing World, J. Canadell, D. Pataki, L. Pitelka, eds. Springer, New York. Article in pdf.
Vila, M., Corbin, J.D., Dukes, J.S., Pino, J., Smith, S.D. 2007. Linking plant invasions to global environmental change. Pages 93-102 in: Terrestrial Ecosystems in a Changing World, J. Canadell, D. Pataki, L. Pitelka, eds. Springer, New York. Article in pdf.
Charles, H., Dukes, J.S. 2007. Impacts of invasive species on ecosystem services. Pages 217-237 in: Biological Invasions, W. Nentwig, ed. Springer, Berlin. Article in pdf.
Dukes, J.S., Chiariello, N.R., Cleland, E.E., Moore, L.A., Shaw, M.R., Thayer, S., Tobeck, T., Mooney, H.A., Field, C.B. 2005. Responses of grassland production to single and multiple global environmental changes. PLoS Biology, 3(10): 1829-1837. (Article free to public from PLoS Biology, an open access journal. Synopsis for general audience also available). Article in pdf.
Dukes, J.S. and Mooney, H.A. 2004. Disruption of ecosystem processes in western North America by invasive species. Revista Chilena de Historia Natural, 77: 411-437. (Article free to public from RCHN, an open access journal) Article in pdf.
Hooper, D.U., Dukes, J.S. 2004. Overyielding among plant functional groups in a long-term experiment. Ecology Letters, 7: 95-105. Article in pdf.
Luo,Y., Su, B., Currie, W.S., Dukes, J.S., Finzi, A., Hartwig, U., Hungate, B., McMurtrie, R., Oren, R., Parton, W.J., Pataki, D., Shaw, R., Zak, D.R., Field, C. 2004. Progressive Nitrogen Limitation of Ecosystem Responses to Rising Atmospheric CO2. BioScience, 54: 731-739.
Dukes, J.S. 2003. Burning buried sunshine: human consumption of ancient solar energy. Climatic Change, 61(1-2): 31-44. Article in pdf. Journal homepage. Links to media coverage of this paper.
Hungate, B.A., Dukes, J.S., Shaw, M.R., Luo, Y., Field, C.B. 2003. Nitrogen and climate change. Science, 302: 1512-1513. Article in pdf.
Levine, J.M., Vila, M., D'Antonio, C.M., Dukes, J.S., Grigulis, K., and Lavorel, S. 2003. Mechanisms underlying the impacts of exotic plant invasions. Proceedings of the Royal Sociey of London B, 270: 775-781. Article in pdf. Appendix.
Dukes, J.S. 2002. Species composition and diversity affect grassland susceptibility and response to invasion. Ecological Applications, 12(2): 602-617. Article in pdf.
Dukes, J.S. and Hungate, B.A. 2002. Elevated CO2 and litter decomposition in California annual grasslands: which mechanisms matter? Ecosystems, 5(2): 171-183. Abstract. Article in pdf.
Dukes, J.S. 2002. Comparison of the effect of elevated CO2 on an invasive species (Centaurea solstitialis) in monoculture and community settings. Plant Ecology, 160(2): 225-234. Abstract. Article in pdf.
Dukes, J.S. 2001. Productivity and complementarity in grassland microcosms of varying diversity. Oikos, 94(3):468-480. Article in pdf. (I have included Figure 1 in this pdf file - it was left out of the original electronic publication. The correction with Figure 1 was published in 2001 as Oikos 95(3):549. Erratum in pdf.)
Dukes, J.S. 2001. Biodiversity and invasibility in grassland microcosms. Oecologia, 126(4):563-568. Article in pdf. The original HTML publication is available on LINK at http://link.springer-ny.com/
Dukes, J.S. 2000. Will the rising atmospheric CO2 concentration affect biological invaders? In: Invasive Species in a Changing World, H. Mooney and R. Hobbs, eds. Island Press, Washington, pp. 95-113. Preprint in pdf.
Dukes, J.S. and Field, C.B. 2000. Diverse mechanisms for CO2 effects on grassland litter decomposition. Global Change Biology 6 (2): 145-154. Abstract. Article in pdf.
Dukes, J.S. and Mooney, H.A. 1999. Does global change increase the success of biological invaders? Trends in Ecology and Evolution 14 (4): 135-139. Abstract. Article in pdf.
Bergmann, B.A., Dukes, J., and Stomp, A.-M. 1997. Infection of Pinus radiata with Agrobacterium rhizogenes and long-term growth of detached hairy roots in vitro. New Zealand Journal of Forestry Science 27(1): 11-22. Abstract.
I grew up in Northern California, attended Brown University as an undergraduate and did my Ph.D. research in the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University. My thesis advisor was Hal Mooney. The core of my dissertation research was published in Oecologia (Dukes 2001) and Ecological Applications (Dukes 2002).
After grad school, I spent two years as a Hollaender Postdoctoral Fellow in the lab of Jim Ehleringer at the University of Utah. I worked on several projects during this time. Early results from one of these projects were published in Ecology Letters (Hooper & Dukes 2004). The project from this time period that garnered the most attention was my paper "Burning buried sunshine," published in Climatic Change (Dukes 2003).
During 2002 and 2003, I helped coordinate the Jasper Ridge Global Change Experiment. This project, led by Chris Field and currently in its eighth year, applied warming, elevated CO2, nitrogen, and water (in a full factorial design) to plots of California grassland. A fire that burned through part of the experiment in 2003 changed the experimental design somewhat, and added interesting new angles. I and other researchers on this project are investigating how ecosystems will respond to predicted future climate and atmospheric conditions. We're studying the productivity of ecosystems, interactions among various members of plant communities, carbon storage on land, and other properties of ecosystems. Currently, I am collaborating on a data-model intercomparison, and also examining how the various aspects of global change influence the success of yellow starthistle, the invasive species used in some of my previous work.
For several years now, David Hooper (Western Washington University) and I have been studying how the functional group composition and richness of a plant community affect that community's invasibility. We are attempting to correlate resource availability with invasibility, and we are examining whether functional group diversity moderates the impact of invaders. Dave has a more detailed description of the project on one of his web pages. I have some photos of the research site here. In a separate study, I am examining how plant leaf d13C varies along gradients of precipitation, and with plant functional type.
I am working with Lindsey Rustad (USFS) and several other researchers on NE Forests 2100. This project will compile and publish a synthesis of climatic change research in the northeastern U.S. and eastern Canada.
--NEW-- With funding from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy (National Institute for Climatic Change Research), my group is currently constructing the Boston-Area Climate Experiment (BACE) in Waltham, Massachusetts. The BACE is designed to characterize old-field responses to climate change, and will feature 5 levels of warming across each of three precipitation treatments. I welcome inquiries from researchers, prospective students, and middle- and high-school teachers who are interested in getting involved with the BACE.
Questions being asked in my lab
- What properties of ecosystems make them susceptible to invasion by non-native species?
- What properties of ecosystems make them vulnerable to the IMPACTS of invaders?
- How will the various elements of global change, such as climate change, increasing CO2, and increasing nitrogen deposition affect the species composition of plant communities?
- Are invasive species favored by global changes?
- How do changes in community composition alter ecosystem structure and function?
- How do changes in climate alter ecosystem structure and function?
- How can we best restore invaded ecosystems?
Interested in ecological research? Interested in how people are affecting ecosystems? If so, consider joining the lab. I am always happy to develop projects with motivated undergraduates. I am also interested in taking on additional graduate students. If you are looking for experience in the field of ecology and you think any of my research topics are interesting, please send me an email. I expect students in the lab to work hard, learn a lot, and have a great time. My interests are broad, so projects on a wide variety of topics are possible. At the current time, I am most keenly interested in taking on graduate students who are interested in examining ecosystem responses to climate change.
