Lichens in a mutualistic interaction Study Fallon, Nevada 2013
Lunar Crater, Palisade Mesa Wilderness Area, Nevada 2013
Moore locating radioactively-labeled seeds using a Geiger counter
Little Valley, Nevada 2010
Chris Moore is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Colby College. He has a B.S. in Biology from California State Polytechnic University and received a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2014. Moore is primarily an ecologist, studying the population and community ecology of mutualism. Since arriving at Colby in 2017, Moore has taught Introduction to Ecology, Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases, and Ecological Modeling. When it comes to research, Moore is investigating the ecology of species interactions, focusing on positive species interactions and species interactions across space. His research can be broken down into three areas: mutualistic interactions, spatial ecology, and the R environment as a tool for ecological problems.
Looking at the first area of his research, mutualistic interactions, the focus here is on the problem of mutualistic feedback. Mutualism is arguably the most common ecological interaction and is essentially an interaction in which two species benefit each other. Mutualistic feedback is a positive feedback loop in a way, and is the idea that one species benefits the second, that species then benefits the first, and so on. Moore has spent his time as a postdoc trying to accomplish two goals in his research: The first is to gain a better understanding of the problem of mutualistic feedback, and second, to develop a framework that doesn’t result in unrealistic/infinite population sizes. Moore is working with Karen Abbott at Case Western Reserve, and they have several ongoing projects to accomplish the two goals above. One of these projects, which focused on the role of nonlinear intraspecific density dependence on stabilizing mutualistic positive feedback, was published in Ecological Modeling.
The second aspect of Moore’s research is dispersal and spatial ecology. The goal in this aspect of his research is to understand how dispersal affects ecological and evolutionary dynamics. Specifically, Chris looked into a mechanism of seed dispersal for the Jeffrey Pine, and as a result became interested in the relationship between disperser behavior and patterns of seed deposition. At Colby, Moore’s lab is studying ant species distribution across elevations, and Moore’s lab has the largest collection of ants from Maine in the world.
The last aspect of Moore’s research is utilizing the R programming language to better understand ecology. Chris has do-developed his own package in R called QPot that analyzes two dimensional differential equations. He is currently working on a spatial modeling project and in the process of trying to create R’s first library for hexagonal lattices and spatial modeling. While Moore’s primary focus as a professor and a researcher is ecology, it’s important to note that ecology and evolution are not that different, and the contributions of Darwin, Linnaeus, and others certainly influence the development of both ecology and evolution.
Curated by Beck French