Dr. Noelle Beckman Explores Changing Seed Dispersal
Dr. Noelle Beckman leads an NSF-funded, multi-institution effort aimed at investigating the
evolution of the high diversity of chemical compounds found in plants
Plants can simply drop their seeds or release them to the wind or a nearby stream. But those with fleshy fruits provide food to animals that carry the seeds in their digestive tracts and deposit them.
However, insects and plant pathogens are also drawn to the fruit, but they consume and kill the seeds.
Utah State University ecologists, along with colleagues at Virginia Tech and Loyola University, hypothesize these varied interactions are driving the evolution of the high diversity of chemical compounds found in plants.
“One small plant tissue sample may contain thousands of plant compounds,” says Noelle Beckman, assistant professor in Utah State’s Department of Biology and the USU Ecology Center. “A complex combination of processes explains and affects this biodiversity.”
Dr. Beckman is the lead principal investigator for the multi-institution effort, which is supported by National Research Foundation grants totaling more than $1.5 million. Much of her lab’s research depends on data collected from Panama’s Barro Colorado Island, site of the century-old Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Situated on the man-made Gatun Lake in the middle of the Panama Canal, the site is one of the most intensely studied topical forest systems in the world.