James Mickley

• Ph.D.
• Assistant Professor of Practice & Instructor at Oregon State University

Species introductions of anthropogenic origins are a major aspect of rapid ecological change globally. Research on biological invasions has generated a large literature on many different aspects of this phenomenon. Here, we describe and categorize some aspects of this literature, to better understand what has been studied and what we know, mapping...

Due to fire suppression subsequent to European settlement, Midwestern oak savanna has become one of the rarest ecosystems in North America, with only 0.02% of the original range surviving today. Because of the necessity of fire in perpetuating this ecosystem, restoration and management is difficult, especially because little is known about original...

The study of animals in the wild offers opportunities to collect relevant information on their natural behavior and abilities to perform ecologically relevant tasks. However, it also poses challenges such as accounting for observer effects, human sensory limitations, and the time intensiveness of this type of research. To meet these challenges, fie...

1. Rapid climate change is generating an urgent need to understand how organisms respond to environmental variation. Understanding these responses at an organismal level requires environmental data at finer spatial and temporal scales than is available from global datasets. Current measurement technologies force a trade‐off between collecting data...

An important part of processing elicited numerical inputs is an ability to quantitatively decode natural-language words that are commonly used to express or modify numerical values. These include ‘about’, ‘around’, ‘almost’, ‘exactly’, ‘nearly’, ‘below’, ‘at least’, ‘order of’, etc., which are collectively known as approximators or numerical hedges...

Growing evidence suggests that organisms with narrow niche requirements are particularly disadvantaged in small habitat patches, typical of fragmented landscapes. However, the mechanisms behind this relationship remain unclear. Dietary specialists may be particularly constrained by the availability of their food resources as habitat area shrinks. F...

Remote sensing imagery can provide critical information on the magnitude and extent of damage caused by forest pests and pathogens. However, monitoring short‐term changes in deciduous forest condition caused by defoliating insects is challenging and requires approaches that directly account for seasonal vegetation dynamics. We implemented a previou...

Premise The evolution of variation in reproductive traits is of longstanding interest in biology. In plants, meristic traits, such as petal and sepal numbers, are usually considered invariant within taxa. However, certain species consistently exhibit great variability in these traits, though the factors contributing to “atypical” counts are not wel...

Tropical tree‐species richness is positively correlated with annual precipitation, but the mechanisms remain unclear. Phytopathogens promote tree‐species coexistence by disproportionately afflicting seedlings of locally abundant species, generating a rare species advantage. We consider whether increased plant–pathogen interactions in humid conditio...

Ecological interactions increasingly occur in the context of anthropogenic landscape alteration, such as landscape fragmentation, which engenders numerous changes to abiotic and biotic processes. Theory and empirical evidence suggest that species that are ecologically specialized or positioned at higher trophic levels are most sensitive to the effe...

Petal number is diverse among angiosperms, yet many clades are fixed for five-petaled flowers, with widespread stasis within and among species. This stasis has been presumed adaptive, maintained by pollinator-mediated stabilizing selection. Despite broad patterns of stasis, some species exhibit within-individual variation that can be used to test m...

Despite their limitations as a platform for calculations, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets enjoy widespread use throughout much of engineering and science, and they have emerged as a lingua franca for computations in some quarters. Given their ubiquity, it would be useful if Excel spreadsheets could express uncertainty in inputs and propagate uncertain...

Background/Question/Methods Scientific approaches to literature review, including quantitative methods for research synthesis (meta-analysis), have become more established in ecology over the past 15 years. Formal systematic review protocols, now well established in medical research synthesis, have not yet been widely implemented in ecology. Syst...