Conservation ecologist Paul CaraDonna, who serves as a research scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden, a professor of instruction at Northwestern University, Illinois, and as a principal investigator at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, Gothic, Colo., laments "the lack knowledge of the basic ecology" of many organisms in plant-pollinator interteractions.

CaraDonna, the first speaker in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology's fall seminar series, will discuss "Understanding the Dynamics of Plant-Animal Interactions in a Changing World," at 4:10 p.m., Monday, Oct. 2 in 122 Briggs Hall. The seminar also will be on Zoom. The link: https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882 849672

Host is pollination ecologist Neal Williams, professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, who will introduce CaraDonna.

"Plant-pollinator interactions are ubiquitous and play an important role in ecosystem functioning across the globe," CaraDonna says in his abstract. "Critically, plants, pollinators, and their interactions face numerous threats in our changing world, including those related to climate change. However, our understanding of the consequences of these threats to plant-pollinator interactions has been hampered because we lack knowledge of the basic ecology of many of these organisms, and how their ecology responds to changing abiotic and biotic conditions. We will investigate these issues in this seminar."

CaraDonna has served as associate editor of the Journal of Animal Ecology since January 2021. "I'm based at the Chicago Botanic Garden, the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, and also Northwestern University. The Chicago Botanic Garden is where my lab is based; I teach at Northwestern; and do my field research at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory." (See interview on Journal of Animal Ecology website and information on the Caradonna Lab website.) 

CaraDonna, who grew up in the Boston area, holds a bachelor's degree in botany from Humboldt State University (2010) and a doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Arizona (2016). He accepted a position as GROW Research Fellow for the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen in 2015. GROW is the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide.

A research scientist at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory since May of 2011, CaraDonna joined the Chicago Botanic Garden in 2016. On his LinkedIn page, he says: "My research aims to understand the structure and function of ecological communities and species interactions. In doing so, I explore the interplay among ecological community context, environmental variation, and biological timing (phenology). I ask how these factors influence plant and animal populations, their interactions, and community-level patterns from a basic ecological perspective and under rapid climate change scenarios."

Seminar coordinator is Brian Johnson, associate professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. For Zoom technical issues, he may be reached at brnjohnson@ucdavis.edu. The list of seminars is posted here.