Dr. Jennifer A. Dunne .

                               

• Jennifer Dunne is an ecologist with interests in computational ecology and ecoinformatics.  Dr. Dunne is currently a Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and is a co-founder and co-director of the Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology Lab (PEaCE Lab, www.foodwebs.org).  She received a Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from the University of California, Berkeley, and a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biological Informatics. She recently co-edited two volumes on “Ecological Networks” and “Aquatic Food Webs” (see below), and has dozens of publications on food webs, ecological robustness, ecoinformatics, and climate change.

     contact info:
    jdunne@santafe.edu
    phone (505) 946-2766, fax (505) 982-0565
    Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501
 
• Go to Jennifer's PEaCE Lab profile (includes pdfs of publications)
• Go to Jennifer's Santa Fe Institute profile (includes pdf of current CV)

• Research Interests:  For about a decade, I conducted experimental and natural gradient field research on how climate change and microclimate impact and interact with vegetation dynamics and biogeochemistry in chaparral and subalpine meadow ecosystems. Over the last few years, I have shifted into theoretical and computational ecology to elucidate and explain general patterns of ecosystem structure and function, focusing on networks of predator-prey interactions expressed as complex food webs (see image below).  I am using this framework to explore how trophic structure and dynamics interact to promote ecosystem robustness to perturbations such as biodiversity loss and invasions, with broader implications for stability of other types of biotic and abiotic networks. In addition to working with contemporary food webs, I am coordinating an interdisciplinary effort between ecologists and paleobiologists to construct and analyze detailed "paleofoodwebs." We are using these food webs, which extend back more than 500 million years before present, to look at the evolution of ecosystem structure through deep time. We hope to encourage the development of rigorous, quantitative paleoecological community studies by other researchers.  I am also collaborating with archaeologists to look at how Aleuts interacted with the complex, interconnected marine, intertidal, terrestrial, and freshwater ecosystems of the Sanak Island Archipelago (Aluetian Islands, Alaska) over the last 6,000 years.  My interest in facilitating widespread scientific communication and data sharing also motivated my involvement in two interdisciplinary National Science Foundation funded projects, "Webs on the Web: Internet Database, Analysis and Visualization of Ecological Networks" (WoW), and "Semantic Prototypes in Research Ecoinformatics" (SPiRE).  My colleagues and I are developing a WWW knowledge base with integrated ecoinformatics and semantic web tools for biocomplexity research and education relating to the structure and dynamics of empirical and model food webs and other ecological networks. 
  

Like singing or playing music? Download scores of song lyrics and chords in my song books:
Babes (0.8 MB pdf), Dudes (1.0 MB pdf), Dead (0.6 MB pdf)

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