welcome

Welcome to the Systems Ecology and Ecoinformatics Laboratory at the UNCW. The overarching goals of our work are

  1. to understand the lawful processes that create, constrain, and sustain ecosystems, and
  2. to develop a formal science of environment that we can use to comprehend the causes and consequences of both local and global environmental changes.

We use a variety of quantitative, computational and informatic methods to address questions like:

  • What role do indirect effects play in ecological interactions? How rapidly do they develop?
  • What processes are required to explain phytoplankton dynamics in the Ross Sea?
  • What makes an ecosystem sustainable?
  • How do we quantitatively predict environmental impacts?
  • What is environment?

If you are interested in learning more, joining us, or collaborating with us, please contact Dr. Stuart Borrett at borretts _at_ uncw _dot_ edu.

news

Our new article titled : "Throughflow centrality is a global indicator of the functional importance of species in ecosystems" is now in print at Ecological Indicators. doi:10.1016/j.ecolind.2013.03.014.

Emily Oxe, David Hines, and Stuart Borrett presented recent research at a symposium titled Systems Ecology: A Network Perspective and Retrospective at the University of Georgia (USA) in April.

Dr. Borrett is visiting the Duke Network Analysis Center in Durham, NC from Feb 18-March 1.

Our enaR package for Ecological Network Analysis is now available from CRAN. This is the software we introduced at EcoSummit 2012.

Welcome to Ms. Emily Oxe as she joins the lab this Fall 2012 to earn her MS Biology and investigate nitrogen cycling in the New River Estuary.

Our new article titled "A network model shows the importance of coupled processes in the microbial N cycle in the Cape Fear River Estuary" is now in print at Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science. doi:10.1016/j.ecss.2012.04.018. Congrautlations to David Hines, the lead author!

We've learned new tricks to visualize our network models in R. See here and click on software & data/models tab to learn more.