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Contacts: Jim Brown, (505) 277.9337 |
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December 19, 2002 UNM ECOLOGIST WINS MARSH AWARD FOR ECOLOGY Professor Jim Brown of the University of New Mexico will be awarded the
Marsh Award for Ecology at the British Ecological Society’s winter
meeting at the University of York on Dec.19–20, 2002. The Marsh Award is presented annually and recognizes outstanding achievements
and contributions to the science of ecology. The Award is an honorarium
of £1,000 plus a certificate. Brown has made a major contribution to both theoretical and practical
ecology. He is best known for his work, in collaboration with high-energy
physicist Geoffrey West of Los Alamos National Laboratory, on biological
scaling. During the 1990s, Brown and his team developed a metabolic theory
of ecology which Professor Richard Dawkins of the University of Oxford
has described as “a theory of enormous power, explaining a huge range
of facts with great economy.” “Statistical analyses of large data sets have identified empirical
patterns of abundance, distribution, and diversity of species that appear
to hold across nearly all kinds of organisms, from microbes to plants
to animals, and all kinds of environments, from terrestrial to freshwater
to marine,” Brown said explaining the theory. “The theory endeavors to understand how the structure and function
of organisms scale with body size and temperature, and how the resulting
performance of individual organisms affects their ecological roles in
populations, communities, and ecosystems,” said Brown. “The
bottom line is that metabolic rate, the rate at which organisms use energy
and materials, varies in a precise mathematical way with body size and
temperature. This scaling of metabolic rate affects all biological rates
and times, from lifespans and growth rates of organisms to rates of ecological
and evolutionary response to environmental change.” “For 25 years we have been experimentally manipulating and monitoring
the populations of rodents, ants and plants,” he said adding that
he and his colleagues have documented how competition for seeds affects
the abundance, distribution, and species diversity of rodents and ants,
and how seed consumption by these animals affects the composition of the
plant community. “We have also seen major effects of climate and vegetation change. Despite
frequent extinctions and colonizations of species due to these environmental
changes, the overall abundance and species diversity of rodents on the
site have remained surprisingly constant,” he said. One spinoff of Brown’s desert research is a collaborative effort to achieve sustainable livestock grazing and fire regimes to preserve desert ecosystems and biodiversity in the southwestern United States. # # #
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The University
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