Martha F. Hoopes

Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences

Specialization
Conservation biology; invasion dynamics; the role of landscapes and spatial configurations in species interactions, particularly between plants and herbivores.

Ecologist Martha Hoopes is interested in how species coexist and even more in why they don’t. Her research focuses on conservation biology and the human interactions with the environment that lead to rarity, declining population sizes, and even to extinction.

Hoopes’s dissertation work focused on a perennial grass species declining in its native habitat, the San Joaquin Valley of California, where grasslands are a much more dominant part of the landscape than on the East Coast. Much of California’s land management has focused on access to water and reservoirs. The building of levees in the 1950s changed water tables and movement with effects on natural plant and animal communities across California and much of the West. Hoopes examined how changes in water availability combined with increased competition from nonnative plants and mammals. That research led to an interest in the movement of organisms, particularly the transport of nonnative species to new environments where they alter interactions between native species.

Hoopes’s postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley examined spatial community dynamics by looking at the role of dispersal in the dynamics of a galling herbivore (a fly that stimulates a shrub to create a fleshy growth in which the larvae grow) and a suite of parasitoids that attack the herbivore. This research allowed her to explore models that represent community dynamics across habitats with differences in temperature, light, and resource availability. She is continuing her research on the role of movement and invasions in community dynamics by studying competition between native and nonnative plant species and trying to generate generalizations for when nonnatives will have the largest negative impacts on native communities. With colleagues Julie Lockwood at Rutgers University and Michael Marchetti at California State University Chico, Hoopes is currently writing a text book on invasions biology, which is due out from Blackwell Sciences in 2006.