Matt Ayres
Professor Biological Sciences | Dartmouth College | Hanover, New Hampshire | Matt.Ayres@dartmouth.edu
There are more than a million species of insects. A very few are notable pests that impact human welfare. What makes a pest? I study the population ecology of insects, especially forest pests and seek to understand the forces that lead to dramatic fluctuations in some species.
Lombardo, J. A., B. T. Sullivan, S. W. Myers, and M.P. Ayres. 2022. Are southern forests becoming too warm for the southern pine beetle? Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 315: 108813. 10.1016
Ayres, M. P., M. J. Lombardero. 2018. Forest pests and their management in the Anthropocene. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 48:292-301.
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The patterning of population dynamics is a prominent emergent property of biological systems. Most of our research explores spatiotemporal variation in the abundance of forest insects, especially those that are sometimes recognized as pests. Study systems include bark beetles, Lepidoptera, wood wasps, scale insects, phoretic mites, and fungi.
I teach ecology with a strong evolutionary perspective, an attempt to combine natural history with math, and an effort to work across traditional boundaries of taxonomy and biological organization.
