Lotka-Volterra Prizes for Best Student Presentations in Theoretical Ecology
The Theoretical Ecology Section awards the Alfred J. Lotka and Vito Volterra prizes for the best presentations given by students during the Annual Meeting of the ESA. The award is open to graduate student members of the ESA who, as sole or first author, present a talk or poster at the ESA annual meeting describing original research in theoretical ecology. All suitable approaches that yield theoretical insight to ecological phenomena will be considered. Prizes will be awarded on the basis of scientific merit, originality, and clarity of presentation. We are grateful to Sinauer and Elsevier for their continuing support of this competition.
To be considered for this award, prospective candidates must notify an officer of the Theoretical Ecology Section by July 15, 2012, providing the following information:
Applicant's name:
Co-authors:
Title:
Talk or Poster:
Session:
Time/Date/Place of presentation/poster:
Please provide this information by email to katia DOT koelle AT duke DOT edu, and include 'Lotka-Volterra Award' in the subject line.
Current Recipients (2012)
Lotka Award for Best Poster:
Emily Moberg,
MIT/WHOI
"The cost of protecting biodiversity in harvested metacommunities"
Co-author: Michael Neubert
Volterra Award for Best Talk:
Colin Olito,
University of Calgary
"Using a bottom-up model of plant-pollinator interaction networks to investigate the role of foraging decisions vs. topological constraints in determining network structure"
Co-author: Stephen Hausch
Past Years' Recipients
Outstanding Ecological Theory Paper Award
The Theoretical Ecology Section sponsors an annual award for an outstanding published paper
in ecological theory. Papers with a print or electronic publication date in either of the
two years preceding the year of the award are eligible. (For example, papers published in
years n-2 and n-1 are eligible for the award in year n.)
Nominations (including self-nominations) may be made from January 1 - March 1 for each year's
award. Nominations should be sent to the chair and vice-chair, and should include a short
statement by the nominator discussing the paper's merits and suitability for the award.
More information about past winners and application guidelines can be found on the section's
website.
Current Recipients (2012)
The Theoretical Ecology Section is pleased to award the 2012 prize for an outstanding paper to "Comparing the qualitatively different effects of rapidly evolving and rapidly induced defences have on predator-prey interactions" by Michael Cortez, published in Ecology Letters (2011) 14:202-209. This paper unifies models of the ecological impacts of plasticity and rapid evolution, and extends these models to acheive general insights about similarities and differences between heritable and non-heritable trait variation. The results were not intuitive; induced defences stabilize or syncrhonize fluctuations (depending on the rate of induction), whereas rapid evolution can lead to a broader range of dynamics. These results were obtained through mathematical innovation, specifically, application of slow-fast theory to make a general analysis tractable.
Past Years' Recipients
Last updated on: April 12, 2011
Colin Kremer