We study the dynamics of food webs and ecosystems.

Through analysis of predator-prey or plant-herbivore interactions, we resolve the functional role of species within communities and how those roles determine attendant ecosystem functioning. We combine empirical research with mathematical modeling and deal with a variety of ecosystems and study species on 4 continents, ranging from livestock and tigers in Indian jungles to monkeys in Panamanian tropical forests to insects and their spider predators in Connecticut grasslands.

Lab News

  • Here's a great blog post on the work recent lab alum Lauren Smith-Ramesh did while at Yale!
  • Congratulations to recent lab alum Adam Rosenblatt for accepting a faculty position at the University of North Florida!
  • Check out this Q&A session with Os about his new book!
  • Woohoo! Congrats to Karin for successfully defending her PhD dissertation! Hello Dr. Burghardt. Karin will be taking up a Sandra Day O’Connor Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian in Washington DC.
  • Congratulations to Colin for being awarded a 3 year NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology using Biological Collections! Colin will take up the fellowship in Jonathan Losos’ lab at Harvard.
  • Congrats to Lauren who just accepted a Postdoctoral Fellowship at NIMBioS!

Contact Us

Schmitz Lab
Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies
370 Prospect Street
Greeley Laboratory, Room 119
New Haven, CT 06511 USA
Phone: (203) 436-5276
oswald.schmitz [at] yale.edu

Recent Publications

Buchkowski, R.W., M.A. Bradford, A.S. Grandy, O.J. Schmitz, and W.R. Wieder. 2017. Applying population and community ecology theory to advance understanding of belowground biogeochemistry. Ecology Letters 20: 231-245.

Smith-Ramesh, L.M. 2017. Invasive plant alters community and ecosystem dynamics by promoting native predators. Ecology (in press)

Smith-Ramesh, L.M., A.C. Moore and O.J. Schmitz. 2017. Global synthesis suggests that food web connectance correlates to invasion resistance. Global Change Biology 23: 465-473.

Rosenblatt, A.E., Crowley, B.T., and Schmitz, O.J. 2016. Linking trophic interactions to plasticity in thermal sensitivity of geographically separated populations of a herbivore. Evolutionary Ecology doi 10.1007/s10682-016-9827-6.

See all publications.
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2016-2017 Schmitz Lab Members (from left to right): Os, Julia M, Rob B, Mary B, Alex M, Adam E, Sam M, and Kat W.