Jonathan Levine

About

Jonathan Levine is the J.N. Allison Professor of Environmental Studies and serves as the Department Chair of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. His research focuses on population, community, and global change ecology. Levine has contributed to understanding the effects of rapid evolution on species coexistence, the mechanisms of species coexistence in complex communities, and how rapid evolution influences plant population spread in fragmented landscapes. His work also explores how novel competitors shape species' responses to climate change and the role of plant functional traits in species coexistence.

Research topics

• Biology
• Ecology
• Computer Science
• Environmental science
• Geology
• Atmospheric sciences
• Microbiology

Selected publications

• Using ecological coexistence theory to understand antibiotic resistance and microbial competition

  Nature Ecology & Evolution · 2021 · 121 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Small rainfall changes drive substantial changes in plant coexistence

  Nature · 2022 · 92 citations

  DOI

• Why ecologists struggle to predict coexistence from functional traits

  Trends in Ecology & Evolution · 2024-10-31 · 25 citations

  reviewSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• When can higher‐order interactions produce stable coexistence?

  Ecology Letters · 2024-06-01 · 21 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Most ecological models are based on the assumption that species interact in pairs. Diverse communities, however, can have higher-order interactions, in which two or more species jointly impact the growth of a third species. A pitfall of the common pairwise approach is that it misses the higher-order interactions potentially responsible for maintaining natural diversity. Here, we explore the stability properties of systems where higher-order interactions guarantee that a specified set of abundanc…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Competition for time: Evidence for an overlooked, diversity‐maintaining competitive mechanism

  Ecology Letters · 2024-03-01 · 17 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Understanding how diversity is maintained in plant communities requires that we first understand the mechanisms of competition for limiting resources. In ecology, there is an underappreciated but fundamental distinction between systems in which the depletion of limiting resources reduces the growth rates of competitors and systems in which resource depletion reduces the time available for competitors to grow, a mechanism we call 'competition for time'. Importantly, modern community ecology and o…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Environmental Variation, Dormancy, and Rare Plant Persistence in Invaded Habitats

  NSF · $516k · 2003–2008

• Collaborative Research: Niche and Neutral Controls over the Coexistence of Serpentine Annual Plants

  NSF · $338k · 2008–2013

• Collaborative Research: Higher order interactions, functional trait changes, and species coexistence in an annual plant community

  NSF · $541k · 2020–2025

Frequent coauthors

• Mark D. Bertness

  Brown University

  27 shared

• Nathan J. B. Kraft

  University of California, Los Angeles

  22 shared

• Óscar Godoy

  Estación Biológica de Doñana

  20 shared

• George H. Leonard

  19 shared

• Aubrey O. Ingraham

  Dartmouth College

  18 shared

• Paul R. Schmidt

  18 shared

• Peter B. Adler

  Utah State University

  17 shared

• Stephen W. Pacala

  Princeton University

  17 shared

Labs

• Levine LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Integrative Biology

  University of California, Berkeley

  2001

• B.Sc., Biology

  Brown University

  1995

Similar researchers at Princeton University

• David Wilcoveh-85
• C. Jessica E. Metcalfh-78
• Lars Hedinh-74