Department of
Biological Science
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306-1100
Office: 2008 King Life Sciences Building
Telephone: 850-644-4167
email: nunderwood@bio.fsu.edu
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Nora Underwood | |||
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Department of
Biological Science Office: 2008 King Life Sciences Building |
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| I work on the ecology and evolution of plants and insects. I am most interested in questions about population dynamics (how population sizes change through time and space), and the influence of characteristics of individual organisms on population size and distribution. Understanding this connection between individuals and populations means that I like to think about things like genetic variation, phenotypic plasticity, movement behavior, and environmental variation, as well as how population dynamics and evolution might interact. I work on interactions between plants and insect herbivores in part because they play important roles in natural and agricultural communities. Plant-insect systems are also easy to work with so it is possible (in combination with some mathematical models) to do experiments on population dynamics. Because the plant/insect relationship is so important in agriculture, studying the ecology of these systems allows me to focus on basic research questions while also generating information that can be applied to the practical problems of developing more sustainable agriculture. Because the questions that I ask span levels of organization from characteristics of individuals to populations, and encompass both long and short time-frames, I use a combination of greenhouse and field experiments with mathematical modeling. |
