Many workers define ecology as the science that explains the abundance and distribution of species. Despite a century of work on questions surrounding this, the field has only a rudimentary grasp on the factors that are important. Rick Karban (Dept. of Entomology) has been censusing populations of wooly bear caterpillars in the Bodega Bay area for 25 years however, there is relatively little in the way of understanding the factors that produce patterns in abundance and distribution.
Biodiversity is, simply, the variety of life on Earth, and can be characterized at various levels from genes, to species and ecosystems. Understanding the causes of patterns of the diversity of life on Earth and the functional consequences of natural and human-caused variation in that diversity are fundamental goals of ecology and a focus of active research at BML. These studies are all the more pressing given the impact that human activities have on biodiversity.
