William F Morris
Professor

919-684-5257

061 Bio Sci

Research Interests: Population ecology, mutualism, plant-insect interations, life-history adaptations to stochastic environments, theoretical ecology, conservation ecology

Bill Morris studies the population ecology of plants and insects (both herbivores and pollinators). Current projects include: the population dynamic consequences of constitutive and inducible resistance in plants, the maintenance of mutualistic interactions between flowering plants and nectar-robbing pollinators, the use of population-level attributes to detect biotic responses to ongoing environmental changes, and the use of mathematical models to assess viability of threatened and endangered populations. The common thread uniting these projects is that they combine field experiments and mathematical models to study population dynamics in natural and managed systems.

Recent Publications   (More Publications)   (search)

1. Morris, W.F., C.A. Pfister, S. Tuljapurkar, C.V. Haridas, C. Boggs, M.S. Boyce, E.M. Bruna, D.R. Church, T. Coulson, D.F. Doak, S. Forsyth, J.M. Gaillard, C.C. Horvitz, S. Kalisz, B.E. Kendall, T.M. Knight, C.T. Lee, and E.S. Menges, Longevity determines sensitivity of plant and animal populations to changing climatic variability, Ecology, in press (Accepted, 2008) .
2. Morales, M.A., W.F. Morris, and W.G. Wilson, Allee dynamics generated by protection mutualisms can drive oscillations in trophic cascades., Theoretical Ecology, in press. (Accepted, 2008) .
3. Abbott, K.C., W.F. Morris, and K. Gross, Simultaneous effects of food limitation and inducible resistance on herbivore population dynamics., Theoretical Population Biology, in press. (Accepted, 2008) .
4. W.F. Morris, Life History, in S.A. Levin, Ed., Guide to Ecology. Princeton University Press, Princeton, in press (2008) .
5. Morris, W.F., R.A. Hufbauer, A.A. Agrawal, J.D. Bever, V.A. Borowicz, G.S. Gilbert, J.L. Maron, C.E. Mitchell, I.M. Parker, A.G. Power, M.E. Torchin, and D.P. Vázquez, Direct and interactive effects of enemies and mutualists on plant performance: a meta-analysis, Ecology, vol. 88 (2007), pp. 1021-1029 .