Research and Professional Interests:

Since retirement from FSU in 2003, I have been able to explore two areas of ornithological research that had been on the back burner until then, one in systematics and the other in ecology. The first concerns the evidence for the currently widely accepted hypothesis that birds are maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs, a hypothesis that John Pourtless and I call the BMT hypothesis. John is an undergraduate student at FSU, but that designation belies his familiarity with the complexities of this issue. Thus far, we are four years into our collaborative studies. With substantial help from Mark Holder, formerly a postdoctoral fellow in systematics with David Swofford here at FSU, we reanalyzed a standard matrix of morphological data supporting the BMT hypothesis and we constructed and analyzed a new matrix that allowed for making comparisons between the evidence for the BMT and that for four alternative hypotheses. A full report of this project (James and Pourtless, 2009) is available to AOU members on CALIBER and should be more widely available on BioOne in May 2009. We concluded that the evidence supporting the BMT hypothesis is weaker than many claim and that two of the other hypotheses are at least equally viable: the crocodylomorph hypothesis and the early archosaur hypothesis. These last two include the additional inference that at least the core maniraptorans (Dromaeosauridae, Troodontidae, and Oviraptorosauria) are more derived toward modern birds than Archaeopteryx and that they belong within birds, not among the dinosaurs. This step removes most of the current cladistic support for the BMT.

My second retirement project is an extension of previous work in the longleaf pine ecosystem. My collaborators are Michelle Jusino (currently a graduate student at Virginia Tech), Charles Hess (a doctoral student at FSU), David Ray (a forester at the Tall Timbers Research Station), Sutan Wu (a doctoral student in statistics at FSU), Charles McCulloch (a statistician at the University of California, San Francisco), and Carl Walters (a modeler, ecologist, and fisheries biologist at the University of British Columbia). We are trying to develop a model that characterizes forest management options and their relative likelihood of providing sustainability for the full biodiversity of the longleaf-pine ecosystem. Michelle will give a progress report about this project at the Ecological Society of America Meeting in August 2009 in Albuquerque.

My dissertation was a descriptive study of the strikingly similar patterns of intraspecific size variation among species of common birds in the eastern and central United States (James, 1970). That work led to transplant experiments with red-winged blackbirds in the 1980’s in the United States (James 1983) and then to further experiments in Mexico, along with tests of the theoretical assumptions underlying selection models. A review article (James, 1991) summarizes my view that the complex but parallel patterns of size variation seen among species are best explained by both genetically based and environmentally induced physiological adaptations to a Bergmannian response to temperature regimes of the respective environments, but only in combination with moisture. The pattern that is repeated in many bird species is not just a latitudinal gradient. The review article provides a statistical test of this idea for North American passerines. Many of the original geographic ranges of subspecies of these birds were arbitrary breaks in patterns of continuous variation across North America. See Mosimann and James (1979) for a statistical approach to the study of geographic variation in the sizes and shapes of birds.

On the ecology side, I have studied the distributions of birds in relation to the structure of the vegetation in their habitats, approaching the subject from perspective more Gleasonian and Grinnellian than community based (James, 1971). This theme was extended into ecomorphology and developed further by my students Gerald Niemi and David Wiedenfeld. Elizabeth Martin extended it to an experiment with mollusks. I have always thought that individual and population-level processes have more power to account for variation in the morphology and ecology of birds than do community-level processes.

My interest in data analysis led to a review paper about applications of multivariate analysis in ecology with former FSU statistician Charles McCulloch (James and McCulloch, 1990) and then to consideration of ways to analyze data from the Breeding Bird Survey (James et al., 1996).

From 1996 to 2002, FSU ant specialist Walter Tschinkel, University of Georgia soil ecologist Paul Hendrix, and I worked with the USDA Forest Service and a cadre of students to oversee the results of a large-scale prescribed-fire experiment in the longleaf-pine flatwoods of the Apalachicola National Forest. My students Charles Hess, Eric Walters, Bart Kicklighter, and Matthew Schrader studied the responses of the endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers and the abundant red-bellied woodpeckers, while Walter’s team studied the arboreal ants, and Paul’s team studied calcium limitation.

I have served on various National Research Council Committees and the Recovery Science Review Panel of the National Marine Fisheries Service. In 1987 I was president of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, and from 1984 to 1986 I was president of the American Ornithologists’ Union.

Field Guide to the Ground Cover
of the Apalachicola National Forest

Selected Publications:

James, F. C. 1970. Geographic size variation in birds and its relationship to climate. Ecology 51:365-390.

James, F. C. 1971. Ordinations of habitat relationships among breeding birds. Wilson Bulletin 83:215-236. Full text (PDF)

Mosimann, J. E., and F. C. James. 1979. New statistical methods for allometry with application to Florida red-winged blackbirds. Evolution 33:444-459.

James, F. C. 1983. Environmental component of morphological differentiation in birds. Science 221:184-186.

James, F. C., and C. E. McCulloch. 1990. Multivariate analysis in ecology and systematics: panacea or Pandora’s box?. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 21: 129-166. Full text (PDF)

James, F. C. 1991. Complementary descriptive and experimental studies of clinal variation in birds. Am. Zool. 31:694-706.

James, F. C., C. E. McCulloch, and D. A. Wiedenfeld. 1996. New approaches to population trends in land birds. Ecology 77:13-27.

James, F. C. 2001. A research program in ecology and ecomorphology: The 1999 Margaret Morse Nice Lecture. Wilson Bull. 113:140-163. Full text (PDF)

James, F. C., C. A. Hess, B. C. Kicklighter, and R. A. Thum. 2001. Ecosystem management and the niche gestalt of the red-cockaded woodpecker in longleaf pine forests. Ecol. Appl. 11:854-870. Full text (PDF)

James, F. C., and J. A. Pourtless, IV. 2009. Cladistics and the origin of birds: a review and two new analyses. Ornithological Monographs #66, 78 pp., Supplement to The Auk 126:2. Cover, Full text (PDF)

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