As a systems ecologist, I study the processes that create, constrain, and sustain complex systems. Consequently, my research has been interdisciplinary in nature, but focused on aspects of ecosystem organization and transformation. My research interests include ecological modeling and analysis, network analysis, and ecological informatics.

Prior to joining the faculty at UNCW, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. I was affiliated with Dr. Pat Langley's Computational Learning Laboratory, and Dr. Kevin Arrigo's Ocean Biogeochemistry Laboratory. I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Georgia's Institute of Ecology where I studied ecosystem ecology with Dr. Bernard Patten. Before graduate school, I earned a B.A. in Biology with a minor in environmental studies at Austin College, and worked for ENTRIX, Inc. as an environmental consultant preparing environmental impact assessments and management plans, primarily for oil and gas development in Latin America.

Thanks to the Wilmington Star News for the shout out as one of the Cape Fear Faces!

LINKS: CV :: Google Scholar :: ResearchGate :: LinkedIn :: Flickr

CONTACT: borretts (at) uncw (dot) edu

Dr. Borrett is looking for new intellectually curious graduate students who want to work on interesting ecological problems. Opportunites exist for modeling the Cape Fear River Estuary Food web, investigating the aquatic ecosystem in purple pitcher plants, and extensions and applications of Ecological Network Analysis.

Dr. Borrett is looking for new intellectually curious undergraduate students who want to work on interesting ecological problems. Opportunites exist for modeling the Cape Fear River Estuary Food web, investigating the aquatic ecosystem in purple pitcher plants, population studies with Sundews (photo), and extensions and applications of Ecological Network Analysis. Dr. Borrett is also looking for a students to with coding skills to work on the development of the our R package for Ecolgical Network Analysis (enaR, see Borrett & Lau 2014).

Dr. Long combines theoretical and experimental approaches to investigate how interactions among species allow for or prevent their coexistence, and how the number and identity of coexisting species (i.e., diversity) influences the collective performance or functioning of ecosystems.

Links: http://uncw.edu/bio/faculty_long.htm

I am broadly interested in issues related to complex systems, i.e., systems whose macro-scale behaviors cannot be predicted from microscopic (reductionistic) analysis of the system components, and how we can use complex systems approaches to address community ecology problems. Currently, I am investigating how variation within species affects the relationships among many species in species rich communities. In particular, I am interested in how genetics can predict the structure of interactions among associated communities. Toward this end, I am using quantitative modeling techniques to construct networks of species relationships.

Matt's PhD advisor was Dr. Whitham at NAU.

Links: http://dana.ucc.nau.edu/~mkl48/bio/home.html

Tony completed his honors thesis in the laboratory investigating the impact of data uncertainty on the results of Ascendent Perspective of Ecological Network Analysis. The results of his thesis is published in Ecological Modelling. He is now a M.S. candidate at the University of Maryland.

Kaufman, A., S.R. Borrett. 2010. Ecosystem network analysis indicators are generally robust to parameter uncertainty in a phosphorus model of Lake Sidney Lanier, USA. Ecological Modelling 221: 1230-1238. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2009.12.018

Sarah completed her honors thesis in the laboratory that developed a new metric of centrality to measure the relative roles of species in generating total ecosystem activity. She is completed a Fulbright fellowship in Australia, where she assessed the effects of coral decline of fish diversity and abundance of different reef systems. She now works as an analyst for TD Bank

Links: CV

Publications

Fann, S.L. and S.R. Borrett., 2012. Environ centrality reveals the tendency of indirect effects to homogenize the functional importance of species in ecosystems. Journal of Theoretical Biology 294: 74-86. doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2011.10.030 arXiv:1110.5385v1 [q-bio.PE]

Adrian completed his honors research with Dr. Freeze. His thesis was titled: Mathematical Explanation of Ecosystem Homogenization. He is now working on a PhD in statistics at NCSU with Dr. Marie Davidian

Advisor: Dr. Freeze

I attended Grand Valley State University in Michigan for my undergraduate degree, graduating in the spring of 2007 from the Honors College with a B.S. in biology and emphasis in aquatic science. While I have always had a love of biology, my college experiences led me to become passionate for ecology, conservation, and discovery through research. The latter was fueled by my participation in two summer research programs, the McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement program at Grand Valley and the NSF REU program at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. After graduating from GVSU, I worked as a research technician for a Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State University for a year. Following my ambitions to focus on marine systems, I am now pursuing my masters in marine science at UNCW, and plan on following this with a doctoral program. My current research will use network environ analysis to examine the hypothesis that indirect effects are more dominant than direct effects, focusing mainly on marine networks. One day I hope to put all my schooling to good use in a research position, focusing heavily on marine ecology and conservation issues.

Ms. Salas is currenlty a PhD student at UT Austin working with Dr. Tim Keitt. Here is a link to her information at UT.

Masters work publications

Salas, A.K. and S.R. Borrett. 2011. Evidence for dominance of indirect effects in 50 trophic ecosystem network. Ecological Modelling 222: 1192--1204. doi:10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2010.12.002

Borrett, S.R., M.A. Freeze, A.K. Salas. 2011. Equivalence of the ecological network analysis realized input and output oriented indirect effects metric. Ecological Modelling 222: 2142-2148 doi:10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2011.04.003.

Borrett, S.R., A.K. Salas. 2010. Evidence for resource homogenization in 50 trophic ecosystem networks. Ecological Modelling 221: 1710-1716 doi:10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2010.04.004.

Mr. Mejaski developed a network model to analyze the urban water metabolism of Wilmington, NC.

Ms. Palmquest completed a directed indipendent study in the lab to learn about systems ecology research.

Ms. Sosnowski worked on a spatial network ecology project.

Ms. Hand helped build an initial food web model for the benthic zone of the Cape Fear River Estuary

Dave was a Ph.D. student whose research interests lie in exploring how organisms and their environments impact each other. He earned a B.S. in Biology from Wake Forest University in the spring of 2007 and a Master’s in Marine Biology from UNCW in December of 2010. His Master’s research explored resource trade-offs between competing anti-predatory mechanisms in Caribbean sea anemones and found a strong relationship between habitat and defensive strategy. For his Ph.D., Dave has shifted his focus from macrofuana to microorganisms. He is developed several models in conjunction with another Ph.D. student, Jessica Lisa, in order to explore how increasing estuarine salinity may alter microbial communities and the processes they conduct. Specifically, Dave’s research focused on bacterial processes in the nitrogen cycle and synthesizes a variety of data that has been collected by several different groups.

Dave's next step after graduation was a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the EPA in Raleigh, NC.

Links: Google Scholar : ResearchGate

Publications

Hines, D.E, Singh, P., Borrett, S.R. (2016) Evaluating control of nutrient flow in an estuarine nitrogen cycle through comparative network analysis. Ecological Engineering 89:70-79. doi:10.1016/j.ecoleng.2016.01.009

Borrett, S.R, M. Carter, D.E. Hines. Six General Ecosystem Properties are more Intense in Biogeochemical Cycling Networks than Food Webs. Journal of Complex Networks. Preprint: http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.05050v1

Hines, D.E., J.A. Lisa, B. Song, C.R. Tobias, S.R. Borrett. 2015. Estimating the impacts of sea level rise on the coupling of estuarine nitrogen cycling processes through comparative network analysis. Marine Ecology Progress Series 524: 137-154. doi: 10.3354/meps11187. Preprint: arXiv:1311.1171 [q-bio.QM].

Hines, D.E., S.R. Borrett.  2014. Comparison of Network, Neighborhood, and Node levels of analysis in two models of nitrogen cycling in the Cape Fear River Estuary. Ecological Modelling. doi: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2013.11.013.

Hines, D.E., J.A. Lisa, B. Song, C.R. Tobias, S.R. Borrett.  2012 A network model shows the importance of coupled processes in the microbial N cycle in the Cape Fear River Estuary. Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science 20:45-57. doi:10.1016/j.ecss.2012.04.018

Mr. Reeps helped initiate a research program in the SEE Lab investigating the aquatic communities that form in purple pitcher plants. In addition to identifing wild populations in the area for future study and establishing a purple pitcher plant population in the Kresge Greenhouse at UNCW, Matt is began to describe the communities found in selected pitchers. The ultimate goal for this research is to use these natural microcosms as model ecosystems to test ecological hypotheses about community and ecosystem organization and development.

Mr. Schwarz collaborated with Mr. Reeps on establishing the purple pitcher plant resarch program in the SEE Lab. Mr. Schwarz conducted seed germenation experiments. After graduation, Mr. Schwarz started gradutate school at NCSU.

Ms. Johnson assisted with the UNCW Purple Pitcher Plant Population, and estimated the size of a population of Sundews (Drosera brevifolia) growing on campus. She estimated that he poulation included over 6,000 individuals!

In the of Fall 2017, Ms. Valois investigated a population of dwarf sundew (Drosera brevifolia) on the UNCW campus. She censused the population, building on the previous work of Sarah Johnson, and estimate the population growth rate. She estimated that the population contained ~7,000 individuals!

Mr. Anway is interested in the overarching constraints on life in ecosystems: what are the broadest processes that ultimately limit life? For his Masters thesis, he is studying how resource availability and trophic complexity affect mean body size and total biomass by altering metabolic constraints. This research is being conducted using the aquatic micro-ecosystem inside the pitcher of Sarracenia purpurea (purple pitcher plant), which provides a model ecosystem for laboratory experiments and a naturally-occurring analog for comparison.

Borrett, S.R., L. Sheble, J. Moody, A.E. Answay.  2018 Bibliometric reveiw of Ecological Network Analysis: 2010-2016. Ecological Modelling 382:63–82. doi: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2018.04.020

Next Step: Staff Scientist at ERM: Environmental Reseources Managment

Ms. Gribble worked on a Directed Independnet Study during Summer 2017 and Spring 2018. She investigated the impact of indirect effects in ecosystems on the relative importance (throughflow centrality) of the system actors.

Ms. Gribble's next step was to pursue a Masters degree in education.

For her Honors Thesis, Ms. Brewster used Ecological Network Analysis to investigate the ecosystem impacts of shirmping on Core Sound, NC.

Mr. Synan investigated the statisistial dependencies among the many ENA whole system metrics, with the goal of using the information to guide decision making on a reduced set of metics to report.

Hunter's next step was graduate school in geosciences at UNCW

Ms. Bockover is investigated the food web that forms inside the leaves of purple pitcher plants. This work is in collaboration with Dr. Long and Dr. Cahoon.

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Last Modified: March 30, 2023