YALE UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF FORESTRY & ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES
DEPARTMENT OF ECOLOGY & EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY
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David K. Skelly
Yale University
School of Forestry & Environmental Studies
370 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06511 USA
| David K. Skelly PROFESSOR OF ECOLOGY ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR RESEARCH |
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EDUCATION
RESEARCH INTERESTSEcologists are under pressure to scale up their science to deal with larger areas and longer spans of time. At the same time, ecologists and their constituency demand rigor and mechanistic understanding. The goals of large scale ecology are a natural tension point because of the inherent difficulties attendant to linking large scale patterns with underlying mechanisms. My research is focused on this interface. Most of my work has centered on pond-breeding amphibians. These organisms are an excellent case study in the difficulties and promise confronted by ecologists today. By the late 1980's amphibians were held up as a model system in ecology. As a result of more than two decades of steady effort, some of the most rigorous, complex and informative experiments in community ecology had been completed using larval amphibians. Nevertheless, in 1990 when reports of disappearing populations became widespread, amphibian ecologists were left entirely flatfooted. We had very little concrete to say about the situation. More than a decade later, things are only marginally better. This has happened, in large part, because like most of their colleagues, amphibian ecologists have a generally poor knowledge of the patterns and mechanisms of large scale distributions. I have been working toward filling this gap via a combination of experimentation and observation. Below, I briefly sketch five areas of research: |
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 CURRICULUM VITAERECENT PUBLICATIONSSkelly, D. K. and M. F. Benard. 2009. Mystery unsolved: missing limbs in deformed amphibians. Journal of Experimental Zoology B: Molecular and Developmental Evolution. Link Kerby, J. L., K. L. Richards-Hrdlicka, A. Storfer, and D. K. Skelly. 2009 . An examination of amphibian sensitivity to environmental contaminants: Are amphibians poor canaries? Ecology Letters 12:1-8. Link Ligon, N. F., and D. K. Skelly. 2009. Cryptic divergence: countergradient variation in the wood frog. Evolutionary Ecology Research 11:1099-1109. Link Skelly, D. K., and J. L. Richardson. 2009. Larval sampling. Chapter 4 in Amphibian Ecology and Conservation: A Handbook of Techniques. (C. K. Dodd, Editor). Oxford University Press. Werner, E. E., R. A. Relyea, K. L. Yurewicz, D. K. Skelly, and C. J. Davis. 2009. Comparative landscape dynamics of two anuran species: climate driven interaction of local and regional processes. Ecological Monographs 79:503-521. Link McCauley, S. J., C. J. Davis, R. A. Relyea, K. L. Yurewicz, D. K. Skelly, and E. E. Werner. 2008. Metacommunity patterns in larval odonates. Oecologia 158:329-342. Link Schwager, M., F. Bullo, D. Skelly, and D. Rus. 2008. A ladybug exploration strategy for distributed adaptive coverage control. Pages 2346 to 2353 in IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, Pasadena, CA, May 2008. Link Urban, M. C., B. L. Phillips, D. K. Skelly, and R. Shine. 2008. A toad more traveled: the heterogeneous invasion dynamics of cane toads in Australia. American Naturalist 171: E134-E148. Link Skelly, D. K. 2007. The ailing invader. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104:17562-17562. Link Skelly, D. K., S. R. Bolden, L. K. Freidenburg, N. A. Freidenfelds, and R. Levey. 2007. Ribeiroia infection is not responsible for Vermont amphibian deformities. EcoHealth 4:156-163. Link Skelly, D. K., L. N. Joseph, H. P. Possingham, L. K. Freidenburg, T. J. Farrugia, M. T. Kinnison, and A. P. Hendry. 2007. Evolutionary responses to climate change. Conservation Biology 21:1353-1355. Link |