Dean Pearson ( edit )

 
Research interests:
My primary interest lies in integrating community and invasion ecology to advance these fields of research and improve invasives management. Ecological theory is founded on traditional manipulation experiments, where we attempt to understand processes of community assembly by removing individual system components and examining the outcome. However, even relatively recent species assemblages in the northern United States represent collections of organisms that have had roughly 11,000 years to interact and assemble themselves. Thus, simple manipulation experiments can be misleading. Biological invasions represent massive natural experiments whereby a completely novel organism enters into a new system and either fails to establish, establishes with little effect or establishes and completely disrupts the recipient community and forces it to reassemble. Thus, biological invasions provide acid tests for ecological theory by illustrating processes of community assembly and disassembly before our eyes. Such experiments provide unique research opportunities to simultaneously advance ecological theory and improve invasive species management.