Luck: In many species, some individuals produce many offspring while others produce few or none. How much of the variation in lifetime reproductive success is about an individual's traits --- how special they are? How much is due to getting good years and bad years? How much is plain luck? E.g.
- Time and chance: using age partitioning to understand how luck drives variation in reproductive success, RE Snyder, SP Ellner, G Hooker - 2020
- Pluck or Luck: Does Trait Variation or Chance Drive Variation in Lifetime Reproductive Success?, RE Snyder, SP Ellner, The American Naturalist 191 (4), E90-E107
- We happy few: using structured population models to identify the decisive events in the lives of exceptional individuals, RE Snyder, SP Ellner, The American Naturalist 188 (2), E28-E45
Species coexistence: My postdoctoral and early faculty work focused on quantifying species coexistence mechanisms in spatially and spatiotemporally varying environments. My colleagues and I now find ourselves returning to the question of species coexistence, this time looking at ways to quantify contributions to coexistence computationally, in ways that avoid approximations and difficult math. E.g.
- Ellner, Stephen P., Snyder, Robin E., Adler, Peter B., Hooker, Giles. An expanded modern coexistence theory for empirical applications. Ecology Letters, 2019, 22(1), 3-18.
- Ellner, Stephen P., Snyder, Robin E., Adler, Peter B. How to quantify the temporal storage effect using simulations instead of math. Ecology Letters, 2016, 19(11), 1333--1342.