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 ecological systems, 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

In case you missed it, here are the slides from Dr. Borrett's presentation at the Center for Marine Science about Lessons from NSF.      

Dr. Borrett guest lectured in Dr. Ryder's "EDL635 The Academic Profession" class about the National Research Enterprise.             

Dr. Borrett presented Research in Context: Bridging Historical Insight with Contemporary Shifts at the UNCW Fall 2025 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series "From Insight to Impact: A Seminar Series on Research Communication.    

Dr. Borrett was honored to have served as a rotating  program director for the GRANTED initiative at the U.S. National Science Foundation   (press release).                 

Check out our two most recent papers! 

Plant diversity facets differentially affect energy dynamics in grasslands depending on trophic contexts [Ecological Monographs]

Managing range-shifting species in marine reserve networks: the importance of reserve configuration and transient population dynamics [Theoretical Ecology]

Our enaR software package is available from our GitHub enaR site. Please see this brief tutorial for instructions on how to load it from GitHub.

The develoment version of enaR is available on our GitHub site.