James W Dalling
· Director, Integrative Biology Honors Program and Professor, Plant BiologyUniversity of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Botany
Active 1992–2026
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About
James W Dalling is a Professor of Plant Biology at the University of Illinois, with additional appointments at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Center for Global Studies. He holds a B.A. from Oxford University (1988) and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University (1992). His research focuses on tropical forest dynamics, particularly the population and community ecology of tropical forests. He investigates how soil nutrient availability and soil microbial communities influence the composition and diversity of tree communities. Much of his research is conducted in collaboration with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, where he serves as a Research Associate Scientist. His fieldwork is primarily based on Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal Watershed, as well as the Fortuna Forest Reserve and Volcan Barú in western Panama, where he has established and maintains a network of forest dynamics plots spanning a wide range of soil nutrient availabilities and elevations from 700 to 3200 meters. Current projects in his lab explore seed-infecting fungi as a model system to understand plant-pathogen interactions and plant defense traits, the role of soil nutrient availability in structuring tree communities and plant functional traits, and the role of wood nutrients as a nutrient store in nutrient-poor soils and as a determinant of wood decomposer community composition and decay rate. Professor Dalling has been recognized as a Delcomyn…
Research topics
- Biology
- Ecology
- Geography
- Geology
- Environmental science
- Sociology
- Atmospheric sciences
- Remote sensing
- Meteorology
- Materials science
Selected publications
Remote Sensing of Environment · 2022 · 422 citations
NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) is collecting spaceborne full waveform lidar data with a primary science goal of producing accurate estimates of forest aboveground biomass density (AGBD). This paper presents the development of the models used to create GEDI’s footprint-level (~25 m) AGBD (GEDI04_A) product, including a description of the datasets used and the procedure for final model selection. The data used to fit our models are from a compilation of globally distributed…
Termite sensitivity to temperature affects global wood decay rates
Science · 2022 · 140 citations
Deadwood is a large global carbon store with its store size partially determined by biotic decay. Microbial wood decay rates are known to respond to changing temperature and precipitation. Termites are also important decomposers in the tropics but are less well studied. An understanding of their climate sensitivities is needed to estimate climate change effects on wood carbon pools. Using data from 133 sites spanning six continents, we found that termite wood discovery and consumption were highl…
Extending Plant Defense Theory to Seeds
Annual Review of Ecology Evolution and Systematics · 2020 · 104 citations
1st authorCorrespondingPlant defense theory explores how plants invest in defenses against natural enemies but has focused primarily on the traits expressed by juvenile and mature plants. Here we describe the diverse ways in which seeds are chemically and physically defended. We suggest that through associations with other traits, seeds are likely to exhibit defense syndromes that reflect constraints or trade-offs imposed by selection to attract dispersers, enable effective dispersal, ensure appropriate timing of seed…
Wood nutrients: Underexplored traits with functional and biogeochemical consequences
New Phytologist · 2024-10-14 · 7 citations
reviewOpen access1st authorCorrespondingResource storage is a critical component of plant life history. While the storage of nonstructural carbohydrates in wood has been studied extensively, the multiple functions of mineral nutrient storage have received much less attention. Here, we highlight the size of wood nutrient pools, a primary determinant of whole-plant nutrient use efficiency, and a substantial fraction of ecosystem nutrient budgets, particularly tropical forests. Wood nutrient concentrations also show exceptional interspec…
A handbook for standardised measurements of plant reproductive traits: from pollen grain to seedling
Australian Journal of Botany · 2026-01-20 · 5 citations
articleA lack of standardised sampling protocols prevents functional traits from expressing their full potential to advance plant ecology, biogeography, and evolutionary biology. Handbooks providing protocols for standardised measurements of plant functional traits allow researchers to tackle large-scale ecological questions but have traditionally focused on vegetative traits such as leaves, stems and roots. This handbook provides standardised protocols for 58 reproductive traits of flowers (10 traits)…
Recent grants
NSF · $20k · 2013–2015
NSF · $378k · 2011–2016
NSF · $179k · 2002–2007
Frequent coauthors
- 62 shared
Stephen P. Hubbell
University of California, Los Angeles
- 58 shared
Paul‐Camilo Zalamea
- 55 shared
Benjamin L. Turner
Gyeongsang National University
- 39 shared
David F. R. P. Burslem
University of Aberdeen
- 38 shared
Carolina Sarmiento
Front Range Scientific Computations
- 34 shared
Kyle E. Harms
- 34 shared
Adam S. Davis
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- 33 shared
Jérôme Chave
Institut de Recherche pour le Développement
Education
- 1992
PhD, Plant Sciences
University of Cambridge
- 1988
BA, Plant Sciences
University of Oxford
Awards & honors
- Delcomyn Professorial Scholar
- Visiting Fellow, Magdalen College, Oxford
- Beaufort Visiting Fellow, St John's College, Cambridge
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