Archives – Plant Population Ecology

Postdoctoral Excellence Award ESA 2014

The 2014 recipient ESA PPE Post-doctoral Excellence Award winner is Jennifer Gremer for her paper, “Bet hedging in desert winter annual plants: optimal germination strategies in a variable environment” [Ecol.Lett. 17: 380-387]. In this work, Gremer and Venable studied the adaptive nature of delayed seed germination as a bet hedging strategy in 12 Sonoran desert winter annuals. In this elegant work, they utilize a 30-year demographic data set to parameterize the relationship between delayed germination and fitness in a variable environment. They predicted the evolutionary stable germination strategy for these winter annuals and compared this prediction to their field observations. By combining extensive field studies with modeling, their work provides a very rigorous test of bet hedging as an adaptive strategy and their findings provide concrete evidence of the adaptive value of delayed germination in the variable desert environment.

Student Travel Award Winners ESA 2014

Zak Gezon (Dartmouth College)
Jeremy Johnson (Texas A&M)
Brittany West Marsden (University of Maryland)
Nana Zhang (University of Pittsburgh)

Postdoctoral Excellence Award ESA 2013

rupesh_1 The PPE Postdoctoral Excellence Award recognizes an outstanding recent paper in the field of plant population ecology written by a postdoctoral researcher. The 2013 award recipient was Rupesh Kariyat for his paper, “Inbreeding alters volatile signalling phenotypes and influences tri-trophic interactions in horsenettle” (Ecol. Lett. 15:301-309).

Honorable mention was awarded to Rob Salguero-Gomez for his paper, “A demographic approach to study effects of climate change in desert plants” (Philos. Trans. Roy. Soc. Lond. 367:3100-3114).

Student Travel Award Winners ESA 2013

The Plant Population Ecology (PPE) Section of the ESA is proud to announce the 2013 PPE student travel awardees. This recognition highlights the advancements made by young members of our section in the field of plant population ecology. The awards help defray the cost of attending the annual ESA meeting.

Kelsey Yule (University of Arizona)

Megan Sebasky (University of Virginia)

Miranda Redmond (University of Colorado)

Will Petry (University of California Irvine)

Kane Keller (Michigan State University)

Jessica Pratt (University of California Irvine).

Postdoctoral Excellence Award 2012

The Plant Population Ecology (PPE) section of the Ecological Society of America and Journal of Ecology was pleased to award the Plant Population Ecology Postdoctoral Excellence Award, sponsored by Journal of Ecology, to Jennifer Williams at this year’s ESA meeting in Portland, Oregon. This award recognizes an outstanding contribution to plant population ecology published in Journal of Ecology within the past three years by a postdoctoral member of the PPE section. Jennifer was recognized for her 2011 paper, “Distance to stable stage distribution in plant populations and implications for near-term population projections,” co-authored by Jennifer L. Williams, Martha M. Ellis, Mary C. Bricker, Jedediah F. Brodie, and Elliot W. Parsons. (Journal of Ecology 99: 1171-1178). This exceptional paper represents a robust test of a fundamental assumption of population projection matrices—a widely used tool in plant population ecology—and successfully bridges the gap between theory and application in this field. Congratulations, Jennifer!