KURT E. ANDERSON
Assistant Professor of Biology
Office: 2226A Spieth Hall
Phone: (951) 827-2499
Facsimile: (951) 827-4286
E-mail: kurt.anderson@ucr.edu
Degree: Ph.D., University of California-Santa Barbara, 2004.
My interests span a wide variety of topics at the intersection of theoretical, empirical, and applied ecology, and I have explored these interests in both aquatic and terrestrial systems. I am particularly interested in how populations and communities respond to environmental variation, both natural and human driven, and I use a mixture of mathematical and empirical approaches to understand processes that act across scales of spatio-temporal measurement and biological organization. Topics I have pursued in my research include responses of stream populations to multi-scale spatial environmental variation; spatially-explicit consumer-resource interactions in streams and agricultural plant-herbivore systems; linking individual behavior to population-level demography and dispersal patterns using mark-recapture techniques in fishes, birds, and rodents; and meta-analyses of the strengths of trophic cascades across environments.
I am currently accepting students and post-docs interested in any of these topics. Students need not work solely on theory or modeling, but should be interested in applying insights from theory to their projects. I am a member of the Ecology graduate group within EEOB.
Representative Publications:
Anderson, K.E., Inouye, B.D., and N. Underwood. Modeling herbivore competition mediated by inducible plant defenses. Oikos, in press.
Diehl, S., Anderson, K.E., and R.M. Nisbet. In press. Population responses of drifting stream invertebrates to spatial environmental variability: new theoretical developments. In: Lancaster, J., and R.A. Briers, Eds. Aquatic Insects: Challenges to Populations. CABI Publishing, invited chapter.
Anderson, K.E., R.M. Nisbet, and E. McCauley. 2008. The spatial-scale dependence of transient dynamics in streams and rivers. The Bulletin of Mathematical Biology 70: 1480-1502.
Anderson, K.E., Nisbet, R.M., and Diehl, S. 2006. Spatial scaling of consumer-resource interactions in advection-dominated systems. The American Naturalist 168: 358-372.
Anderson, K.E., Paul, A.J., McCauley, E., Jackson, L.J., Post, J.R., and R.M. Nisbet. 2006. Instream flow needs in streams and rivers: the importance of understanding ecological dynamics. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 4: 309-318.
Anderson, K.E., Nisbet, R.M., Diehl, S., and S.D. Cooper. 2005. Scaling population responses to spatial environmental variability in advection-dominated systems. Ecology Letters 8: 933-943.
Anderson, K.E., Rothstein, S.I., Fleischer, R.C., and A.L. O'Loghlen. 2005. Large scale movement patterns among song dialects in the Brown-headed Cowbird, Molothrus ater. The Auk 122: 803-818.
Underwood, N., Anderson, K.E., and B.D. Inouye. 2005. Induced versus constitutive resistance and the spatial distribution of insect herbivores among plants. Ecology 86: 594-602.
Shurin, J.B., Borer, E.T., Seabloom, E.W., Anderson, K., Blanchette, C.A., Broitman, B., Cooper, S.D., and B.S. Halpern. 2002. A cross-ecosystem comparison of the strength of trophic cascades. Ecology Letters 5: 785-791. Highlighted in Science (Editors' Choice), 298 (5598), 2002.
Courses taught:
Biology 116 - Ecology and Conservation Biology
Biology 003 - Organisms in Their Environment
Biology 217 - Population and Community Ecology