Israel Del Toro

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OEB Ph.D. Candidate
B.S., University of Texas El Paso, 2008
Faculty Advisor: Aaron Ellison, Harvard Forest
ideltoro@cns.umass.edu

Research Interests

Biogeographical patterns of ant communities in forested ecosystems

1) Macroecology and Biogeography of Ants: What drives ant species distribution patterns? Could the factors that influence ant species distributions also limit the distribution of other key terrestrial invertebrates? I hope to answer some of these questions with my ongoing dissertation research on the biogeography of ants in the Northeastern U.S.

2) Warm Ants: How will climate change impact ant community assembly and the key ecological processes in which ants are key players (e.g. soil movement). The later chapters of my dissertation research.

3) Phylogeography: Ants are all over the place, but how did they get there? How do ant phylogenies look when they are plotted on a map? These are broad questions I hope to answer in the final part of my dissertation or as a post-doc.

4) Biodiversity Exploration: I love going to new places where ants have never been collected before. In the near future I hope to develop a program for biodiversity exploration of the national parks and reserves of Mexico. Mexico’s insect fauna is not yet well documented. I hope to start serious work on this project by 2012.