The focus of my research is diversity, ranging from the ecological and evolutionary processes that generate and maintain a wide variety of phenotypes and life-history strategies to the mechanisms that create and maintain temporal and spatial patterns of organismal distribution, relative abundance, and species richness. Members of my research group strive for mechanistic understanding of plant strategies and species interactions, per se, and to provide explanations for the structure and dynamics of plant populations and communities, primarily within tropical and sub-tropical latitudes.
Students and post-docs interested in joining my research group may contact
me via the link to my e-mail address. Although the principal subjects of investigation
for members of my lab are tropical and sub-tropical plants – and often including
their interactions with other organisms – I encourage students within my research
group to develop projects that are tailored to, and motivated by, their own
taxonomic and geographic interests.
Bravo, Adriana, Kyle E. Harms, Richard D. Stevens & Louise H. Emmons. 2008. Collpas: Activity hotspots for frugivorous bats (Phyllostomidae) in the Peruvian Amazon. Biotropica 40:203-210.
Paine, C. E. Timothy, Kyle E. Harms, Stefan A. Schnitzer & Walter P. Carson. 2008. Weak competition among tropical tree seedlings: implications for species coexistence. Biotropica 40:432-440.
Carlson, Jane E. & Kyle E. Harms. 2007. The benefits of bathing buds: water calyces protect flowers from a microlepidopteran herbivore. Biology Letters 3:405-407.
John, Robert, James W. Dalling, Kyle E. Harms, Joseph B. Yavitt, Robert F. Stallard, Matthew Mirabello, Stephen P. Hubbell, Renato Valencia, Hugo Navarrete, Martha Vallejo & Robin B. Foster. 2007. Soil nutrients influence spatial distributions of tropical tree species. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104:864-869.
Wills, Christopher, Kyle E. Harms, Richard Condit, David King, Jill Thompson, Fangliang He, Helene C. Muller-Landau, Peter Ashton, Elizabeth Losos, Liza Comita, Stephen Hubbell, James LaFrankie, Sarayudh Bunyavejchewin, H. S. Dattaraja, Stuart Davies, Shameema Esufali, Robin Foster, Nimal Gunatilleke, Savitri Gunatilleke, Pamela Hall, Akira Itoh, Robert John, Somboon Kiratiprayoon, Suzanne Loo de Lao, Marie Massa, Cheryl Nath, Md. Nur Supardi Noor, Abdul Rahman Kassim, Raman Sukumar, Hebbalalu Satyanarayana Suresh, I-Fang Sun, Sylvester Tan, Takuo Yamakura & Jess Zimmerman. 2006. Non-random processes maintain diversity in tropical forests. Science 311:527-531.
Harms, Kyle E., Jennifer S. Powers & Rebecca A. Montgomery. 2004. Variation in small sapling density, understory cover and resource availability in four Neotropical forests. Biotropica 36:40-51.
Harms, Kyle E., Richard Condit, Stephen P. Hubbell & Robin B. Foster. 2001. Habitat associations of trees and shrubs in a 50-ha neotropical forest plot. Journal of Ecology 89:947-959.
Harms, Kyle E., S. Joseph Wright, Osvaldo Calderón, Andrés Hernández & Edward Allen Herre. 2000. Pervasive density-dependent recruitment enhances seedling diversity in a tropical forest. Nature 404:493-495.