Community Ecology

Abstract

Professor Hartnett is a new professor to Oklahoma State University and teaches the “Experimental Design and Analysis in Biology” class. When she was in graduate school she was very interested in community ecology which is the study of an organization and the functioning of many communities, “which are assemblages of interacting populations of the species living within a particular area or habitat” (John Thompson). From this interest she became even more interested in how communities function and how species interacted. Her PhD advisor at the time focused on population genetics, and also focused on single species and the interactions of individuals in the same species or same genetic identity. Within her PhD she looked at how population dynamics affected community properties. With the information her PhD advisor had, she wanted to link the advisors research and findings with her research to observe what was happening at the community level.