Columbia University Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology Department
E3B Associate Professor Andrés Bendesky was featured in Science!
Bendesky and his team describe how they’ve combined genetics and neuroscience to understand what puts the fight in these betta fish.
Learn more and read the paper HERE.
Lourdes Gautier joined the Columbia community in 2000 working in the Political Science department before becoming the first DAAF of the then brand new Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology in the Fall of 2001. This was shortly after 9/11, and despite the excitement of founding a new department at Columbia, the world seemed like an uncertain place. Lourdes’ reassuring competence and good humor were especially appreciated during this time, and remained hallmarks of her work in the department. She put an enormous amount of effort into the new department, which had (at the time) no set ways of doing anything. She really got the department “up and running,” and led it cheerfully. Throughout her time at Columbia, she was known as a fierce advocate for the students and faculty members of E3B. Lourdes ran the department with much grace and aplomb until her retirement in 2019. She will be deeply missed by the students, faculty, staff, and administrators who had the pleasure to work with her.
On May 2, 2023, twelve Columbia GSAS Master’s students competed in the GSAS Master’s SynThesis competition. This competition consists of taking a topic that you’ve been researching and thinking about for over a year, and presenting it to the general public in a three-minute talk, with just one visual slide and no notes to help you. Myles (second from left) spoke about human and wildlife activity in NYC during COVID. You can watch his presentation HERE.
E3B PhD student Marie Lilly from the Diuk-Wasser Eco-epidemiology Lab got to go on set of the Today Show yesterday morning and set up deer tick specimens that the lab collected for a segment about ticks and tick-borne disease! You can watch the full segment on ‘How to protect yourself — and your pets — during tick season’ HERE.
You can also check out the Tick App (https://tickapp.us/) for more information about ticks and tick-borne disease, to report your tick encounters, and to help further Eco-epidemiology lab research efforts!
E3B MA student Emma Lauterbach was tasked by Professor Claudia Dreifus to “write a letter to the editor and send it off.”
Emma did that and it was published in the New York Times!
To read Emma’s letter, please click HERE. Congratulations Emma!
Columbia University Press, in conjunction with the Office of the Provost, is pleased to announce that What Would Nature Do? A Guide for Our Uncertain Times by Ruth DeFries is the winner of the eighth annual Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award.
Ruth DeFries is a Co-Founding Dean of the Columbia Climate School; University Professor; and Denning Family Professor of Sustainable Development in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology.
The Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award is given to the Columbia University faculty member whose book published by the Press in the two years prior brings the highest distinction to Columbia University and Columbia University Press for its outstanding contribution to academic and public discourse. The winner is selected by the Distinguished Book Award jury, which is composed of current members of the Press’s Faculty Publication Committee.
In presenting the award, Professor Adam Reich, chair of the Distinguished Book Award jury and chair of the Press’s Faculty Publication Committee, commented, “DeFries weaves together a highly readable book that approaches our contemporary complex, and potentially failing, society with a spirit of curiosity and pragmatism. Rather than using natural sciences to tell us why our social world can’t be changed, she uses the natural world as a source of inspiration for how we might get out of the various muddles we’ve gotten ourselves into.”
Congratulations to E3B’s very own Professor Matthew Palmer for being selected as one of the recipients of the 2022 Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching!
Dr. Palmer teaches and advises students in several programs, including E3B’s undergraduate, postbaccalaureate, and graduate programs and in the Environmental Science and Policy program in the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). He teaches courses in botany, forest ecology, urban ecology, herpetology, and research methods, often with extensive field and laboratory components. His research includes measuring ecosystem functions in forests, wetlands, and cities, the management of natural areas, and the conservation of biological diversity. He finds great joy in teaching and in helping students to see the natural world with a fresh perspective and to better understand the connections between nature and humanity.
“His course on botany has fundamentally altered the way I look at the world around me. I find myself walking a little more slowly on my way to campus from my dorm every day, just to take a look at the plants around me. Every day I come away with a greater appreciation of Columbia’s campus and the city around me.”—Diego Plaza Homiston (CC’23)
Congratulations Matt on this wonderful, well-deserved achievement!
Named in honor of one of the founders of our department, the Melnick Award recognizes outstanding dissertation work and other departmental activities.
Alex’s dissertation focused on how agricultural frontiers influence losses of nitrogen. Conventional agricultural practices in Europe, North America, and Asia lead to large nitrogen losses that cause dead zones, smog, and greenhouse warming. Agriculture is expanding along climate frontiers, occupying vast regions of the tropics that previously had little large-scale agriculture, and along management frontiers, with new crops and techniques. Do these frontiers exacerbate nitrogen leaks or mitigate them?
Alex first addressed climate frontiers, studying nitrogen losses in tropical agroecosystems. She studied field systems in Mato Grosso, Brazil, where agriculture is expanding rapidly. Her first chapter (AGE 2021) found that excess fertilizer in these agroecosystems leads to among the highest emissions ever recorded of nitric oxide (which forms smog).
Alex’s collaborators in Brazil had previously found that huge amounts of nitrate (which causes dead zones) accumulate deep in the soil rather than leaking out into waterways. Alex’s second chapter (Ecosystems 2022) tested an explanation for this high nitrate storage. She found that negatively charged ions (anions, like nitrate) stuck tightly to the soils in Mato Grosso, unlike the common situation in temperate soils (which tend to stick to cations instead of anions). This “anion exchange capacity” combined with the great depth of the soils (over 8 meters (!)) meant that the soils in Mato Grosso could continue to store nitrate at current levels of fertilization for tens-hundreds of years.
This nitrate storage in Mato Grosso was intriguing. Was it ubiquitous in tropical agroecosystems? In her third chapter (a meta-analysis; Global Change Biology 2020), Alex found that it was not. She found that tropical agroecosystems leak as much nitrate as temperate ecosystems for a given level of fertilizer. However, she found that tropical agroecosystems emit substantially more nitric oxide than their temperate counterparts, as she had observed in Mato Grosso.
Alex’s fourth chapter focused on a management frontier: perennial grains. Perennial grains are hypothesized to mitigate nitrogen losses compared with conventional agriculture, yet this hypothesis has rarely been tested. Alex worked at the SAFE experiment at the Lönnstorp Research Station, which grows perennial wheat alongside annual wheat. She found that her hypothesis was spot on: perennial wheat soaks up way more nitrogen than annual wheat, essentially preventing nitrogen losses (~100 fold lower).
Alex’s work is cutting-edge biogeochemistry. Fittingly, given the namesake of this award, her work matters for people and has clear management implications. In addition to her outstanding academic success, Alex was an excellent departmental citizen. She was deeply involved in DEI efforts, culminating in co-founding the Environmental Justice and Urban Ecology Summer Research Program.
Congratulations Alex!
Congratulations to the E3B students won prizes at the NEEP (Northeastern Evolutionary Primatologists) meeting at Boston University!
MA student Lilah Sciaky won runner-up for best podium presentation, EBHS alumna Sofia Schembari (pictured) won runner up for best poster, and PhD student Amanda Johnson received an honorable mention for her poster.
Columbia has announced the creation of the Columbia Climate School, with E3B Professor Ruth DeFries named as Co-Founding Dean.
Ruth will remain a University Professor and Denning Family Professor of Sustainable Development in E3B, as well as continue to play an integral role in the Undergraduate Program in Sustainable Development at Columbia’s Earth Institute. Her world-renowned scholarship is committed to understanding the changes experienced by the planet over the course of human existence. She is also a public advocate whose dogged commitment has resulted in advances around the world concerning climate change, food insecurity, and nature conservation. And, importantly, she has been instrumental in the creation of several innovative Earth Institute programs.
Please see more about this announcement HERE!
Professor Deren Eaton wins NSF Career AwardDeren Eaton, Ph.D., assistant professor of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology, has been awarded the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, the NSF’s highest honor awarded to early career faculty. The five-year $956K grant will support his proposal “Linking Phylogenetic Inference at Genome-wide and Local Genealogical Scales”.
Eaton’s research combines computational genomics and bioinformatics with field-based studies of diverse and hybridizing plant species to examine the evolutionary consequences of hybridization in shaping the history of plant diversification. With the NSF grant, Eaton’s lab will produce new genomic data sets, and develop new software tools, to better understand how variation within and among genomes is affected by historical hybridization.
“The size, complexity and variation among plant genomes presents a major challenge for comparative genomics, for which most tools have been designed to examine variation in human genomes, which are really not that variable,” says Eaton, who is also an affiliate member of Columbia’s Data Science Institute. “Now that we can more easily assemble complete plant genomes, we can begin to investigate evolutionary relationships not only among populations and species, but also in terms of how such patterns vary across regions of their genomes. The extent and speed with which plant genomes rearrange affects patterns of genetic linkage, which in turn can bias many phylogenetic inference methods. By developing new methods that accommodate variable genome structure and linkage we can establish better null hypotheses against which to detect interesting patterns, such as genomic signatures of hybridization.”
Eaton’s project will produce new software tools for inferring the evolutionary history of organisms from genomic data, as well as new didactic tools that will form the basis of a new course at Columbia focused on phylogenetic algorithms and methods. This research fits into a broader theme of Eaton’s lab towards understanding the drivers of diversification in global hotspots of plant diversity. “A major outcome of this research will be an improved understanding of the extent of hybridization across the tree of life, which is fundamental to our understanding of biodiversity and evolution, but also has important implications for conservation”, says Eaton. His lab will apply their new methods to investigate gene flow among endemic plant species in alpine regions of the Tibetan plateau that have historically been highly isolated, but now come into contact as a result of human development, land-use transformation, and climate change.
