​Jonathan Myers, professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, is the program director of ecology and evolutionary biology at WashU. His research group studies the causes of biodiversity at multiple scales, ranging from variation in the diversity of species’ traits to gradients in the diversity and dynamics of ecological communities across the planet. He is an expert in community ecology, biogeography, evolutionary biology and plant functional ecology.
Myers uses field experiments, large-scale and long-term observations, ecological modeling and synthesis to study ecosystems that include temperate plant and pollinator communities in North America (e.g., the Ozarks and Rocky Mountains); sub-tropical savannas within the hyperdiverse and threatened longleaf pine ecosystem of the southeastern United States (e.g., Florida and Louisiana); tropical forests from the Amazon to the Andes (e.g., Bolivia); and a worldwide network of temperate and tropical forest-dynamics plots coordinated through the Smithsonian Center for Tropical Forest Science-Forest Global Earth Observatory (CTFS-ForestGEO).