John Sabo
Food Web Dynamics; Thermal Biology; Riparian Ecology
My research focuses on theoretical and empirical aspects of food webs in river and riparian ecosystems. I am particularly interested in the interfaces between population approaches (i.e., demography, stochasticity) and community questions and between ecosystem approaches (i.e., energy and nutrient budgets) and some of the same community questions. More specifically, I have three research themes: 1) Quantifying flows of energy, nutrients and water from river to riparian food webs and evaluating the impacts of these spatial flows on the strength of key species interactions in terrestrial food webs, 2) Evaluating the relative roles of disturbance, ecosystem size and resource availability in determining the length of food chains in stream ecosystems and 3) Integrating variability-or environmental stochasticity-and statistical approaches to measuring population persistence into models of species interactions to understand the effects of non-native species in native communities. My research efforts involve a significant field component, including large-scale experiments and broad-scale syntheses of existing data. In addition to field research, my work also relies heavily on theoretical and statistical models to generate predictions for experimentation and answers to questions not amenable to experiments. I invite field-savvy students to apply to help craft fruitful approaches to answering questions in these three research areas.
Selected Publications
Sabo, J. L., E. E. Holmes and P. Kareiva. In press. Efficacy of simple viability models in ecological risk assessment: Does density dependence matter? Ecology 85.
Sabo, J. L. 2003. Hot rocks: The effects of substrate texture on the clutch production of riparian lizards. Oecologia 136:329-335.
Sabo, J. L. and M. E. Power. 2002. Aggregation of lizards in near-river habitats: Aquatic resource tracking and short-term indirect effects on in situ resources. Ecology 83(11): 3023-3036.
Sabo, J. L. and M. E. Power. 2002. River-watershed exchange: Effects of riverine subsidies on riparian lizards and their terrestrial prey. Ecology 83 (7): 1860-1869.
Bastow, J., J. L. Sabo, J. C. Finlay and M. E. Power. 2002. The effects of river derived algal and water resources on the spatial distribution of riparian pygmy grasshoppers. Oecologia 131(2): 261-268.
Porter, W. P., J. L. Sabo, C. R. Tracy, O. J. Reichman and N. Ramankutty. 2002. Physiology on a landscape scale: Plant-animal interactions. Integrative and Comparative Biology 42(3):431-453.