Recent Courses
EE BIOL 122 - Ecology
EE BIOL 194B - Research Group or Internship Seminars: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
EE BIOL 200B - Ecology
Research Areas
Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, Theory
Research Interests
My research focuses on how the interplay between abiotic environmental variation and biotic interactions influences ecological and evolutionary dynamics. It seeks to explain patterns of dynamics and diversity that are observed in nature, and to predict how such patterns may change under perturbations to the abiotic and biotic environment. I use a combination of field observations, manipulative experiments and mathematical models. The distinctive features of my work are the strong mechanistic focus and the tight integration between theory and data. My work is also broad, spanning investigations of the interplay between biotic interactions and temporal variation on the one hand, with temperature as the axis of abiotic variation, and biotic interactions and spatial variation on the other, with dispersal as a mechanism for sampling spatial heterogeneity.
Selected Publications
Smith, D.J. and P. Amarasekare (Authors contributed equally), "Towards a mechanistic understanding of thermal niche partitioning", The American Naturalist, 191 : 57-75 (2018) .
Okamoto, K., and P. Amarasekare., "A framework for highthroughput ecoevolutionary simulations integrating multilocus forwardtime population genetics and community ecology", Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 9 : 525-534 (2018) .
Uszko, W., S. Diehl, G. Englund and P. Amarasekare., "Effects of warming on predator-prey interactions - a resource-based approach and a theoretical synthesis", Ecology Letters, 20 : 513-523 (2017) .
Scranton, K., and P. Amarasekare (Authors contributed equally), "Predicting phenological shifts in a changing climate", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114 : 13212-13217 (2017) .
Amarasekare, P., "The evolution of dispersal in a multi-trophic community context", Oikos, 125 : 514-525 (2016) .
Johnson, C., R. Coutinho, E. Berlin, K. Dolphin, J. Heyer, B. Kim, A. Leung, J. Sabellon and P. Amarasekare., "Effects of temperature and resource variation on insect population dynamics: the bordered plant bug as a case study", Functional Ecology, 30 : 1122-1131 (2016) .
Amarasekare, P., "Effects of temperature on consumer-resource interactions", Journal of Animal Ecology, 84 : 665-679 (2015) .
Borrelli, J., S. Allesina, P. Amarasekare, R. Arditi, I. Chase, J. Damuth, R. D. Holt, D. O. Logofet, M. Novak, R. P. Rohr, A. G. Rossberg, M. Spencer, J. K. Tran, and L. R. Ginzburg, "Selection on stability across ecological scales", Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 30 : 417-425 (2015) .
Okamoto, K., B. Langerhans, R. Rashid and P. Amarasekare., "Microevolutionary patterns in the common caiman predict macroevolutionary trends across extant crocodilians", Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 116 : 834-846 (2015) .
Johnson, C.J. and Amarasekare, P. (Authors contributed equally), "A metric for quantifying the oscillatory tendency of consumer-resource interactions", The American Naturalist, 185 : 87-99 (2015) .