James S. Clark

Duke University


Primary Section: 63, Environmental Sciences and Ecology
Secondary Section: 64, Human Environmental Sciences
Membership Type:
Member (elected 2020)

Biosketch

Clark’s lab uses using long-term experiments and monitoring studies to understand disturbance and climate controls on ecosystem dynamics. He received a BS from the North Carolina State University in Entomology, a MS from the University of Massachusetts in Forestry and Wildlife, and a PhD from the University of Minnesota in Ecology. Between his MS and PhD, he studied at the University of Göttingen under a Fulbright-DAAD fellowship. At Duke University, Clark teaches Biodiversity Science and Applications and Ecological Models & Data. Clark is a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America, which also recognized him with the William Skinner Cooper Award, for his research on barrier beach dynamics, and the George Mercer Award, for studies of climate change and fire. He is an ESA Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow. For excellence in teaching and research, he was one of 15 scientists recognized with the National Science Foundation’s five-yr Presidential Faculty Fellow Award.  He is a recipient of the Humboldt Research Prize and a Lauréat of Emmanuel Macron’s Make Our Planet Great Again. Clark is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Research Interests

The Clark lab bridges the fields of ecology, Bayesian statistics, and, bioinformatics to understand how communities of species respond to global change. Large field experiments and modeling innovations allow us to quantify the direct effects of climate change on species responses together with the indirect effects that percolate dynamically through food webs. His analyses allow us to rank each species in terms of vulnerability to climate change, in terms of fecundity, growth, and survival. His Generalized Joint Attribute Modeling (GJAM) software in R has now been installed > 30,000 times.  He is currently leading a global effort on Masting Inference and Forecasting (MASTIF) to understand how climate change will affect the biodiversity of our next generation of forests and the species that depend on them.

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