James P. O’Dwyer

The paper develops a minimal predictive model for forest dynamics, showing environmental variation and life history traits govern species abundance and distribution.

The paper investigates multiple stable equilibria in competitive ecological systems using Lotka-Volterra models, finding that basins of attraction scale exponentially with equilibrium biomass.

The paper reconstructs the evolutionary history of microbial traits to understand how and why organisms acquired specific functions, showing that generalist genomes have more labile genes while specialist genomes have more conserved genes.