Claudio Gratton

About

Claudio Gratton is a full Professor in the Department of Entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has been faculty since 2003. His research broadly focuses on the landscape ecology of arthropods in both agricultural and natural systems, with particular interests in insect conservation within agricultural landscapes. Gratton's work examines the role of unmanaged non-crop lands in influencing the abundance and diversity of beneficial insects such as predators and pollinators, and how these effects contribute to ecosystem services in agricultural habitats. He has been actively involved in bee and butterfly conservation efforts in Wisconsin and collaborates with local growers of crops like potatoes, soybeans, cranberries, and apples, as well as rotational grazers, to develop land-use and management strategies that enhance beneficial insect populations. His research also explores ecosystem linkages between lakes and terrestrial landscapes, emphasizing the role of aquatic insects in creating these linkages. Gratton's interests include agroecology, conservation, ecosystem services, natural pest suppression, pollination ecology, biological control, food webs, and eco-informatics. He has contributed to understanding how land-cover and land-use interact with management practices to support insect conservation and ecosystem health.

Research topics

• Biology
• Ecology
• Agroforestry
• Geography
• Agronomy
• Environmental science
• Machine Learning
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Environmental resource management

Selected publications

• Assessing the potential for deep learning and computer vision to identify bumble bee species from images

  Scientific Reports · 2021 · 96 citations

  Pollinators are undergoing a global decline. Although vital to pollinator conservation and ecological research, species-level identification is expensive, time consuming, and requires specialized taxonomic training. However, deep learning and computer vision are providing ways to open this methodological bottleneck through automated identification from images. Focusing on bumble bees, we compare four convolutional neural network classification models to evaluate prediction speed, accuracy, and t…

  DOI

• Impacts of field-edge flower plantings on pollinator conservation and ecosystem service delivery – A meta-analysis

  Agriculture Ecosystems & Environment · 2021 · 85 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Temporal Resource (Dis)continuity for Conservation Biological Control: From Field to Landscape Scales

  Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems · 2020 · 82 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Conservation biological control (CBC) seeks to promote the occurrence of natural enemies of agricultural pests by managing habitat to provide key resources in and around farm fields. In particular, vegetation diversity may help ensure temporal resource continuity such that natural enemies are less likely to experience detrimental gaps or bottlenecks as they move through and use different habitats. While the conceptual value of resource continuity has long been recognized by CBC researchers and p…

  DOI

• Land Use Change Consistently Reduces α‐ But Not β‐ and γ‐Diversity of Bees

  Global Change Biology · 2025-01-01 · 17 citations

  articleOpen access

  Land use change threatens global biodiversity and compromises ecosystem functions, including pollination and food production. Reduced taxonomic α-diversity is often reported under land use change, yet the impacts could be different at larger spatial scales (i.e., γ-diversity), either due to reduced β-diversity amplifying diversity loss or increased β-diversity dampening diversity loss. Additionally, studies often focus on taxonomic diversity, while other important biodiversity components, includ…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Restoring functional farmland biodiversity for biological pest control

  Trends in Plant Science · 2025-04-29 · 11 citations

  reviewOpen access

  Roughly 40% of global agri-food production is lost to pests during an era when productivity gains are essential to humanity. Restoring farmland biodiversity for conservation biological control offers potential to secure win-win outcomes for yield and the environment. However, achieving this is hindered by gaps in our understanding of agrobiodiversity, including a lack of data on the occurrence, identity, and interactions of farm-dwelling (plant, animal, microbial) biota. Limited interdisciplinar…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Linking Lakes to Land: Understanding the Spatial and Temporal Aspects of Allochthonous Subsidies

  NSF · $672k · 2007–2012

Frequent coauthors

• J. Hallet

  McGill University

  126 shared

• N. Coburn

  University of Toronto

  96 shared

• A. Mahar

  90 shared

• L. Davis

  Sunnybrook Research Institute

  78 shared

• Timothy D. Meehan

  National Audubon Society

  75 shared

• A. Seely

  Northwestern University

  72 shared

• Y. Shargall

  McMaster University

  69 shared

• V. Zuk

  McGill University

  66 shared

Labs

• Gratton LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Entomology

  University of California, Berkeley

  1990

• M.S., Entomology

  University of California, Berkeley

  1985

• B.S., Entomology

  University of California, Berkeley

  1983

Awards & honors

• Post-doctoral mentoring award, UW post-doc association 2018
• Vilas Associates Research Award, University of Wisconsin, VC…
• McMaster Research Fellow, CSIRO, Brisbane, Australia, 2016
• Vilas Mid-Career Travel Award, University of Wisconsin, 2015
• Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow, Stanford University/Woods In…

Similar researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Cameron Currieh-99
• Anthony Ivesh-88
• Bobbi Peckarskyh-53