Maitner Lab
Biodiversity and global change ecology at the University of South Florida – St. Petersburg
Overview
The Maitner Lab is led by Dr. Brian Maitner in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of South Florida – St. Petersburg. The focus of the lab is (primarily) on topics related to biodiversity, including quantifying and mapping biodiversity, understanding the drivers of biodiversity patterns and how biodiversity may be impacted by global changes, and working on making these findings relevant for decision makers. Work in the lab is open to any group of organisms, but tends to focus on plants (as they account for most of the biomass on Earth and their traits are primary drivers of terrestrial ecosystem functioning). We practice Open Science and take a highly collaborative and cooperative approach to research.
Research Areas
We ask where life on Earth is, why it is there, and what is about to happen to it. Our main research areas are:
- Early warnings under climate extremes: forecasting where species will face extreme heat and novel climates, and quantifying the biodiversity impacts of events like the Amazon and Australian fires.
- Mapping the species we know least about: rarity, gaps in our knowledge of plant traits, and species distribution models built for small samples.
- Conservation in a changing world: using biodiversity data to inform protected areas and conservation priorities.
- Open biodiversity data and software: BIEN and tools for cleaning and standardizing biodiversity data (TNRS, GNRS, NSR, RMMS).
- Open Science: building open tools and studying how open practices like code sharing shape science.
- Functional traits, from plots to the planet: trait distributions, field work on four continents, and the Plant Functional Traits Courses.
- Biological invasions and global patterns of diversity: why some introduced species succeed, and what drives large-scale diversity patterns.
See Research for details and key papers, or Publications for a full list of our papers, preprints, R packages, and datasets.
Join the lab!
We’re currently looking for graduate students to join the lab. Students should be strongly self-motivated and full of ideas they’re interested in! In particular, we’re looking for students that have an interest in either (or both) of the following approaches: 1) using data wrangling and coding to address large-scale questions, or 2) using field-based methods to address ecological or global-change questions. See the Prospective Students page for details on how to apply, or email Brian if you’re interested.