Brian McGill

Professor of Biological Science, joint appointment Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions

Research Topic:
Large scale ecology and global change

Research Program:
I study questions pertaining to biodiversity at large scales – large areas of space, long periods of time, many species. These questions have been deemphasized in ecology due to the difficulty in doing experiments, but are of high relevance to conservation and management questions. I have two broad research questions. One is developing the ability to predict how species ranges will respond to climate change. The other is finding ways to measure the impact of humans (especially land cover change) on community structure.

Publications:
Magurran, Anne and Brian J. McGill co-editors of “Biological diversity: frontiers in measurement and assessment” Oxford University Press

Samson, J ; Berteaux, D; McGill, Brian J. and Humphries, M – “Geographic disparities and moral hazards in the predicted impacts of climate change on human populations” (Global Ecology and Biogeography in press)

Messier, Julie; Brian J. McGill and Martin Lechowicz – “How do leaf traits vary across ecological scales?” (Ecology Letters 2010) 13:838-848)

McGill, Brian J. – “Matters of Scale” (Science 2010) 328(30 Apr):575-576

McGill, Brian J. – “Towards a unification of unified theories of biodiversity” (Ecology Letters 2010) 13(5):627-642

McGill, Brian J; Rampal S. Etienne; John S. Gray and 15 other authors – “Species Abundance Distributions: moving beyond single prediction theories to integration within an ecological framework” (Ecology Letters 2007 10:995-1015)

McGill, Brian J; Brian Enquist, Evan Weiher and Mark Westoby – “Rebuilding community ecology from functional traits” (Trends in Ecology and Evolution 2006 21(4):178-185)

McGill, Brian J; Hadly, Elizabeth A; Maurer, Brian A “Community inertia of Quaternary small mammal assemblages in North America” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 2005 102:16701-16706)

McGill, Brian J – “A test of the unified neutral theory of biodiversity” (Nature 2003 vol 422(24 April): 881-885)