Jean-Philippe Gibert, associate professor of biology at Duke University and Simons Foundation Early Career Fellow, is using mathematical models to explore how climate change affects food webs—the complex networks of species and their feeding interactions. His lab focuses on food webs between microbes, which make up roughly a third of Earth’s biomass and play a major role in global carbon emissions. Gibert’s research reveals that as temperatures shift, species respond differently, altering their abundance and interactions. These changes ripple through ecosystems in cascading effects, impacting everything from microbes to apex predators like polar bears.
He and his team have developed a mathematical equation that predicts how temperature changes influence species abundance based on two key factors: each species’ temperature response and who eats whom. This “one equation to rule them all” simplifies a complex ecological process and could help forecast the fate of food webs worldwide. READ MORE.
Research from Jean-Philippe Gibert’s lab shows that microbes can be powerful forecasters of climate change. Photo credit: Daniel J. Wieczynski.