William Fagan

HONR 238N  Honors Interdisciplinary Seminar:   Extinction Risk: Where Biology, Geography, and Mathematics Meet

BIOL 708T   Theoretical Ecology

BIOL 708U   Practicum in Data Analysis

My research involves meshing field biology with theoretical models to address critical questions in community ecology and conservation biology. I believe that ecological theory will be strengthened if it is forced to help solve real-world problems, and that conservation biology involves difficult choices that demand quantitative approaches. My ongoing research falls in several areas that illustrate this melding of theory and problem-solving, including 1) spatial ecological dynamics, 2) ecoinformatics, biodiversity databases, and conservation planning, and 3) biological stoichiometry and paleoecostoichioproteomics.

• Fagan, W.F., C. Cosner, E.A. Larsen, and J.M. Calabrese. In press. Reproductive asynchrony in spatial population models: How mating behavior can modulate Allee effects arising from isolation in both space and time. American Naturalist. In revision.
• Fagan, W.F., Cantrell, S., C. Cosner, and S. Ramakrishnan. 2009. Interspecific variation in critical patch size and gap crossing ability as determinants of geographic range size distributions. American Naturalist. 173: 363-375.
• Lynch, H.J. and W.F. Fagan. 2008. Survivorship curves and their impact on the estimation of maximum population growth rates. Ecology. 90: 1116-1124.
• Muneepeerakul, R., E. Bertuzzo, H. Lynch, W. F. Fagan, A. Rinaldo, and I. Rodriguez-Iturbe. 2008. Fish diversity patterns in Mississippi-Missouri basin support neutral metacommunity models. Nature, 453: 220-3.
• Mueller, T. and W.F.Fagan. 2008. Search and navigation in dynamic environments - from individual behaviors to population distributions. Oikos, 117: 654-664.
• Calabrese, J.M., L. Ries, S.F. Matter, J. Auckland, J. Roland, D.M.. Debinski, and W.F. Fagan. .2008.  Reproductive asynchrony in natural butterfly populations and its consequences for female matelessness. Journal of Animal Ecology, 77: 746-756.

• University of Maryland College of Chemical and Life Sciences Research Award, 2009.

• Presidential Award, The American Society of Naturalists, for best paper in American Naturalist in 2005 for:  Fagan, W.F., M.A. Lewis, M. Neubert, C. Aumann, J. Apple, and J.G. Bishop. 2005. When can herbivores reverse the spread of an invading plant? A test case from Mount St. Helens. American Naturalist. 166: 669-686

• Guggenheim Fellow, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 2001-2002