David Inouye, Professor Emeritus University of Maryland and Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory Dr. Inouye, past President of the Ecological Society of America, has worked with bumblebees, euglossine bees, pollinating flies, tephritid flies, hummingbirds, and wildflowers, on topics including pollination biology, flowering phenology, plant demography, and plant-animal interactions such as ant-plant mutualisms, nectar robbing, and seed predation. He has worked in Australia, Austria, Central America, and Colorado, where he has spent summer field seasons since 1971 at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL). Rebecca Irwin, Associate Professor, North Carolina State University I am a community and evolutionary ecologist and am passionate about plants, pollinators, and their interactions. Current research projects include how pollinators and pollination are responding to environmental change (invasive species, urbanization, and climate change), exploitation of pollination mutualisms, and effects of secondary compounds on pollinators and their parasites. Brian Inouye, Professor, Florida State University The main goal of my research program is to join theoretical and empirical approaches to understanding how species coexist. In particular, I am interested in how spatial and temporal variation in species interactions (particularly insects) influence population dynamics, patterns of community structure, and coexistence. Making connections between data and theory requires use of mathematical models, knowledge of experimental design and statistical analysis, and an appreciation of natural history. I am excited about and involved in research in each of these areas. Nora Underwood, Professor, Florida State University I am interested in how the characteristics of individual organisms influence population dynamics, evolution, and species interactions. I think about things like genetic variation, phenotypic plasticity, movement behavior, spatial scale and environmental variation, as well as how population dynamics and evolution interact. I work primarily on interactions between plants and insects because they play important roles in natural and agricultural communities, and I use a combination of field and greenhouse experiments with mathematical modeling. Aimee Classen, Associate Professor, University of Vermont Our lab focuses on how global changes impact terrestrial ecosystems around the globe. Recently, we’ve focused on three general areas: (1) Understanding and modeling connections among soil organisms, herbivores, plants, and ecosystem function, (2) Understanding how shifting above- and below-ground biodiversity and global change alters the composition and function of ecosystems, and (3) Exploring how scale and location influence ecological patterns and processes. We work across scales from the micro (soil food webs) to the macro (regional carbon fluxes) as well as across diverse terrestrial ecosystems (forests, meadows, bogs, tropics, boreal, temperate). We use a combination of observations, experiments, and models to answer ecological questions. billy barr, Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory billy arrived in Gothic in 1972 and has lived there year-round since 1973, recording weather and other data since 1974. He seems to like it there and may decide to stay. billy also maintains the Gothic weather webpage. Rebecca Dalton, Postdoctoral Researcher I use a combination of field experiments, observations, and demographic models to examine ​the relationship between climate change, phenology, and species interactions.