Annette Ostling

Contact/Bio | Research | Publications | Teaching | CV

Curriculum vitae

Education

PhD  University of California, Berkeley, Energy and Resources, December 2004
Advisor:  Prof. John Harte

MS   University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Physics, 1999
Advisor:  Prof. Robert Leigh

AB   Columbia University, Physics, 1994

Professional Experience
Assistant Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan.  Summer 2006 to present.
Council on Science and Technology Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Mentor: Simon Levin.  2004-2006.

Fellowships and Academic Awards
Princeton Univ. Council on Science and Technology Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship.  2004-2006.
EPA STAR Graduate Fellowship.  2003-2004.
Santa Fe Institute Complex Systems Summer School Fellowship.  2001.
Department of Education GAAN Fellowship.  1995-1996.
NSF Graduate Fellowship Competition: Commended.  1996.
NSF REU Summer Program, UC Irvine Physics Department.  1993.

Grants

NSF Advance at the University of Michigan, Elizabeth Caroline Crosby Research Grant ($15,000).  Towards a General Theory of Fitness-Equalized Communities. (October, 2006 – December, 2007).

Publications 

Ballantyne, F., Menge, D., Ostling, A., and P. Hosseini.  (In press)  Nutrient recycling affects autotroph and ecosystem stochiometry.  American Naturalist.

Alonso, D., Ostling A., and R. Etienne.  (In press) The assumption of symmetry and species abundance distributions.  Ecology Letters.

McGill, B., Ettiene, R.S., Gray, J., Alonso, D., Anderson, M.J., Benecha, H.K., Dornelas, M., Enquist, B.J., Green, J.L., He, F., Hurlbert, A., Magurran, A.E., Marquet, P.A., Maurer, B.A., Ostling, A., Sokyan, C.U., Ugland, K., White, E. (2007) Species abundance distributions: Moving beyond single prediction theories to integration within an ecological framework. Ecology Letters 10:  995-1015.

Carey, S., Ostling, A., Harte, J., and R. del Moral.  (2007) Impact of curve construction and community dynamics on the species-time relationship.  Ecology 88: 2145-2153.

Ostling, A. (2005) Neutral theory tested by birds.  Nature 436: 635. (News and Views)

A. Ostling, J. L. Green, and A. B. Smith. (2005) A theory of spatial-abundance and species-abundance distributions in ecological communities at multiple spatial scales. Ecological Monographs 75: 179-197.

Harte, J., A. Ostling, J. L. Green, and A. P. Kinzig. (2004) Climate Change and Extinction.  Nature 430: Brief Communications.

Ostling, A., J. Harte, J. L. Green, and A. P. Kinzig. (2004) Self-similarity, the power-law form of the species-area relationship, and a probability rule:  A reply.  The American Naturalist 163: 627-633.

Brose, U., A. Ostling, K. Harrison, and N. D. Martinez. (2004)  Unified spatial scaling of species and their trophic interactions.  Nature 428:167-171.

Green, J. L., and A. Ostling.  (2003) Endemics-area relationships: the influence of species dominance and spatial aggregation.  Ecology 84: 3090-3094.

Ostling, A., J. Harte, J. L. Green, and A. P. Kinzig. (2003) A community-level fractal property produces power-law species-area relationships in nature. Oikos 103: 218-224.

Green, J. L., J. Harte, and A. Ostling.  (2003) Species richness, endemism and abundance patterns:  tests of two fractal models in a serpentine grassland Ecology Letters 6: 919-928.

Harte, J., T. Blackburn, and A. Ostling. (2001) Self-similarity and the relationship between abundance and range size. The American Naturalist 157:374-386.

Green, J. L., J. Harte, and A. Ostling. (2001) Global warming, temperature homogenization and species extinction, in Biotic Homogenization, Lockwood, J. and M. McKinney, editors, Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers (2001).

Ostling, A., J. Harte, and J. Green. (2000) Self-similarity and clustering in the spatial distribution of species -Technical Comment. Science 290:671a.

Sardesai M., C. Figge, M. Bodner, M. Crosby, J. Hansen, J. A. Quillfeldt, S. Landau, A. Ostling, S. Vuong, and G. L. Shaw.  (2001) Reliable short-term memory in the trion model: toward a cortical language and grammar. Biological Cybernetics 84:173-182.

Teaching

Population and Community Ecology (co-taught with M. Pascual).  Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Fall 2006.
Population and Community Ecology (lecturer, lead instructors S. Levin and A. Dobson). Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University.  3 lectures in Fall, 2005 and 1 lecture in Fall, 2004.
Quantitative Aspects of Global Environmental Problems (graduate student instructor, lead instructor J. Harte) Energy and Resources Group, University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2003.
Physics Courses ranging from Practical Physics: How Things Work- A Course for Nonscientists to General Field Theory (graduate student instructor).  Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Six semesters during 1995-1999.

Student and Postdoctoral Mentoring

Susanna Messinger (current graduate student), Judith Wan (current graduate student co-advised with Philip Myers), Brian Sedio (current graduate student co-advised with Chris Dick), Jeffrey Lake (current postdoctoral), David Alonso (former postdoc).

Invited Talks

Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley, 2005.
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, 2005.
Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Milbrook, NY, 2004.
Young Scientists Symposium on Spatial Ecology, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2004.
McGill Centre for Bioinformatics.  McGill University, Canada, 2004.
75th Anniversary Symposium of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory:  Gunnison Basin as a Model Ecosystem, Mt. Crested Butte, CO, 2003.
Meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology. Panama City, Panama, 2002.
Institute for Theoretical Physics, UC Santa Barbara, Program on Statistical Physics and Biological Information, 2001.

Organizational Activities
Niche versus neutral: a look at an iconic idea in community ecology, its challenger, and the middle ground, Parts I and II (co-organizer with N. Sanders and J. Lake).  Symposium and Organized Oral Session at the Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, 2006.

Workshops
Towards a Unified Theory of Biodiversity. National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, Santa Barbara, CA, 2007.
Unifying Current Theories of Ecology.  Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2006.
Tools and fresh approaches for species abundance distributions.  National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (Working Group), Santa Barbara, CA, 2006, 2007.

Referee Activities
Reviewed for American Naturalist, Ecography, Ecology, Ecology Letters, Journal of Theoretical Biology, Journal of Statistical Physics, Journal of Zoology, Oikos, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Theoretical Population Biology, and Trends in Ecology and Evolution.