Animal & Range Sciences

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The curricula in animal science provide students with a firm foundation in the biological and natural sciences, animal breeding, reproductive physiology, nutrition, and livestock production and management. Natural Resources & Rangeland Ecology focuses on managing the interaction of livestock, and wildlife and their rangeland habitats. Emphasis is placed on soil, water and vegetation attributes which influence habitat ecology and management of livestock and wildlife.

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Author: search.filters.author.Atwater, Daniel Z.Start date: 2021

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    Adaptive constraints at the range edge of a widespread and expanding invasive plant
    (Oxford University Press, 2023-12) Fletcher, Rebecca A.; Atwater, Daniel Z.; Haak, David C.; Bagavathiannan, Muthukumar V.; DiTommaso, Antonio; Lehnhoff, Erik; Paterson, Andrew H.; Auckland, Susan; Govindasmo, Prabhu; Lemke, Cornelia; Morris, Edward; Rainville, Lisa; Barney, Jacob N.
    Identifying the factors that facilitate and limit invasive species’ range expansion has both practical and theoretical importance, especially at the range edges. Here, we used reciprocal common garden experiments spanning the North/South and East/West range that include the North American core, intermediate and range edges of the globally invasive plant, Johnsongrass (Sorghum halepense) to investigate the interplay of climate, biotic interactions (i.e. competition) and patterns of adaptation. Our results suggest that the rapid range expansion of Johnsongrass into diverse environments across wide geographies occurred largely without local adaptation, but that further range expansion may be restricted by a fitness trade-off that limits population growth at the range edge. Interestingly, plant competition strongly dampened Johnsongrass growth but did not change the rank order performance of populations within a garden, though this varied among gardens (climates). Our findings highlight the importance of including the range edge when studying the range dynamics of invasive species, especially as we try to understand how invasive species will respond to accelerating global changes.
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    Suppression force-fields and diffuse competition: competition de-escalation is an evolutionarily stable strategy
    (The Royal Society, 2023-08) Atwater, Daniel Z.
    Competition theory is founded on the premise that individuals benefit from harming their competitors, which helps them secure resources and prevent inhibition by neighbours. When multiple individuals compete, however, competition has complex indirect effects that reverberate through competitive neighbourhoods. The consequences of such ‘diffuse’ competition are poorly understood. For example, competitive effects may dilute as they propagate through a neighbourhood, weakening benefits of neighbour suppression. Another possibility is that competitive effects may rebound on strong competitors, as their inhibitory effects on their neighbours benefit other competitors in the community. Diffuse competition is unintuitive in part because we lack a clear conceptual framework for understanding how individual interactions manifest in communities of multiple competitors. Here, I use mathematical and agent-based models to illustrate that diffuse interactions—as opposed to direct pairwise interactions—are probably the dominant mode of interaction among multiple competitors. Consequently, competitive effects may regularly rebound, incurring fitness costs under certain conditions, especially when kin–kin interactions are common. These models provide a powerful framework for investigating competitive ability and its evolution and produce clear predictions in ecologically realistic scenarios.
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