Andrew Altieri

About

Andrew Altieri is an Associate Professor and the Interim Director of the Center for Coastal Solutions at the University of Florida. He earned his BA at UC Santa Cruz and his PhD at Brown University, followed by postdoctoral research at Northeastern University and Brown University. Prior to joining UF, he was a staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. His research interests focus on human impacts on coastal ecosystems, particularly the ecological interactions that influence the response of biogenic habitats and their associated communities to those impacts. As an Associate Director in UF's Center for Coastal Solutions, he contributes to interdisciplinary efforts aimed at understanding and addressing coastal environmental challenges.

Research topics

• Geography
• Biology
• Ecology
• Environmental science
• Oceanography
• Geology
• Fishery
• Cartography

Selected publications

• Environmental DNA survey captures patterns of fish and invertebrate diversity across a tropical seascape

  Scientific Reports · 2020 · 113 citations

  Accurate, rapid, and comprehensive biodiversity assessments are critical for investigating ecological processes and supporting conservation efforts. Environmental DNA (eDNA) surveys show promise as a way to effectively characterize fine-scale patterns of community composition. We tested whether a single PCR survey of eDNA in seawater using a broad metazoan primer could identify differences in community composition between five adjacent habitats at 19 sites across a tropical Caribbean bay in Pana…

  DOI

• Rapid ecosystem-scale consequences of acute deoxygenation on a Caribbean coral reef

  Nature Communications · 2021 · 97 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Loss of oxygen in the global ocean is accelerating due to climate change and eutrophication, but how acute deoxygenation events affect tropical marine ecosystems remains poorly understood. Here we integrate analyses of coral reef benthic communities with microbial community sequencing to show how a deoxygenation event rapidly altered benthic community composition and microbial assemblages in a shallow tropical reef ecosystem. Conditions associated with the event precipitated coral bleaching and…

  DOI

• Predator control of marine communities increases with temperature across 115 degrees of latitude

  Science · 2022 · 91 citations

  Early naturalists suggested that predation intensity increases toward the tropics, affecting fundamental ecological and evolutionary processes by latitude, but empirical support is still limited. Several studies have measured consumption rates across latitude at large scales, with variable results. Moreover, how predation affects prey community composition at such geographic scales remains unknown. Using standardized experiments that spanned 115° of latitude, at 36 nearshore sites along both coa…

  PublisherDOI

• Sea-level rise and the emergence of a keystone grazer alter the geomorphic evolution and ecology of southeast US salt marshes

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2020 · 79 citations

  functions as a keystone species that is driving dynamic, landscape-scale changes in salt-marsh geomorphic evolution, spatial organization, and species interactions.

  DOI

• Climate drives the geography of marine consumption by changing predator communities

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2020 · 47 citations

  The global distribution of primary production and consumption by humans (fisheries) is well-documented, but we have no map linking the central ecological process of consumption within food webs to temperature and other ecological drivers. Using standardized assays that span 105° of latitude on four continents, we show that rates of bait consumption by generalist predators in shallow marine ecosystems are tightly linked to both temperature and the composition of consumer assemblages. Unexpectedly…

  DOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Biodiversity and resilience of corals and their microbiomes in response to ocean deoxygenation

  NSF · $873k · 2021–2025

• CAREER: Life after death in coral reefs: Testing the pivotal role of dead corals in ecosystem resilience

  NSF · $823k · 2023–2028

Frequent coauthors

• Brian R. Silliman

  Duke University

  94 shared

• Mads S. Thomsen

  University of Canterbury

  73 shared

• Thomas Wernberg

  Norwegian Institute of Marine Research

  67 shared

• Karen J. McGlathery

  University of Virginia

  64 shared

• Dana Gulbransen

  University of Virginia

  64 shared

• Fernando Tuya

  Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

  64 shared

• Marianne Holmer

  University of Southern Denmark

  64 shared

• Mark D. Bertness

  Brown University

  52 shared

Education

• B.A.

  UC Santa Cruz

• Ph.D.

  Brown University

• Other

  Northeastern University

• Other

  Brown University

Awards & honors

• National Science Foundation (NSF) Early Career Award 2023

Similar researchers at University of Florida

• Michael Annableh-43
• Sara Behdadh-26