Dr James Bever
 Dr James Bever |
U.S. Fulbright Senior Scholar
Media Profile
“The factors maintaining plant diversity remain an ecological puzzle. We do not understand what processes maintain a high diversity of plant species and why many native species are often unable to re-establish after abandonment of agriculture”.
Dr James Bever, an Associate Professor in Biology at the University of Indiana-Bloomington, has won a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award to Australia in 2006 / 2007. Through his Fulbright Award Dr Bever will undertake collaborative research with the Department of Plant Conservation at the CSIRO in Canberra who have expertise in plant-microbe interactions and spatial modelling.
“The overall goal of my research has been to investigate the importance of plants and soil micro-organisms in ecosystem processes. The importance of soil organisms in the maintenance of diversity and the greater dependence of native species on soil mutualisms, both suggest that attention to soil organisms could be critical to the restoration of native ecosystems.” Dr Bever’s primary theory, backed by strong empirical research, is that soil community feedbacks can maintain even very strong competitors.
“My work will be in collaboration with Drs Jeremy Burdon and Peter Thall at the CSIRO. Dr Burdon is regarded as a foremost authority on the dynamics of plant-pathogen interactions and Dr Thrall is an accomplished theoretician and developer of spatial simulations of population processes.”
Dr Bever is a graduate from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and has a PhD in Biological Sciences from Duke University. His work has been recognised through a range of awards including a National Science Foundation Career Award and an Indiana University Outstanding Junior Faculty Award. He has also won research grants with organisations such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Nature Conservancy and published widely in ecology and biology related to the areas of soils and plants.
Dr Bever’s work has strong applications for agriculture, conservation biology and global ecosystem functioning, contributing to our understanding of the role of soil microbes in the reconstruction of stable, functional plant communities. Many of his results have been recognised as presenting truly novel insights that have caused rethinking of longstanding ideas in ecology and evolutionary biology.