Robert Pringle

About

Robert Pringle is a professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University and serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies. His research addresses a broad suite of questions related to ecology and conservation, including how ecologically similar species coexist, the organization of food webs, the ecological importance of large herbivores and carnivores, and the rules governing biological community assembly and biodiversity patterns in space and time. His work explores the mechanisms behind ecological interactions across gradients of climate and soil fertility, species cooperation and mutualisms, invasion dynamics, plant defense strategies, spatial pattern formation, ecosystem stability, and large-scale ecosystem restoration following disturbances such as civil war and faunal collapse. Pringle's research primarily focuses on African savannas and small Caribbean islands, employing empirical and theoretical approaches, with a particular emphasis on combining DNA metabarcoding and molecular analyses with manipulative field experiments to understand ecological patterns and processes.

Research topics

• Ecology
• Biology
• Computer Science
• Machine Learning
• Psychology
• Data science
• Cognitive psychology

Selected publications

• Dynamic landscapes of fear: understanding spatiotemporal risk

  Trends in Ecology & Evolution · 2022 · 175 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Resolving Food-Web Structure

  Annual Review of Ecology Evolution and Systematics · 2020 · 109 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Food webs are a major focus and organizing theme of ecology, but the data used to assemble them are deficient. Early debates over food-web data focused on taxonomic resolution and completeness, lack of which had produced spurious inferences. Recent data are widely believed to be much better and are used extensively in theoretical and meta-analytic research on network ecology. Confidence in these data rests on the assumptions ( a) that empiricists correctly identified consumers and their foods an…

  DOI

• Trophic rewilding revives biotic resistance to shrub invasion

  Nature Ecology & Evolution · 2020 · 94 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• The generality of cryptic dietary niche differences in diverse large-herbivore assemblages

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022 · 80 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Ecological niche differences are necessary for stable species coexistence but are often difficult to discern. Models of dietary niche differentiation in large mammalian herbivores invoke the quality, quantity, and spatiotemporal distribution of plant tissues and growth forms but are agnostic toward food plant species identity. Empirical support for these models is variable, suggesting that additional mechanisms of resource partitioning may be important in sustaining large-herbivore diversity in…

  DOI

• Grazing herbivores reduce herbaceous biomass and fire activity across African savannas

  Ecology Letters · 2024-06-01 · 24 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Fire and herbivory interact to alter ecosystems and carbon cycling. In savannas, herbivores can reduce fire activity by removing grass biomass, but the size of these effects and what regulates them remain uncertain. To examine grazing effects on fuels and fire regimes across African savannas, we combined data from herbivore exclosure experiments with remotely sensed data on fire activity and herbivore density. We show that, broadly across African savannas, grazing herbivores substantial…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• International Research Fellowship Program: Ecological Consequences of Large-Herbivore Declines under Different Rainfall Regimes

  NSF · $60k · 2009–2011

• BoCP-Implementation: Eco-evolutionary dynamics of rewilding: Real-time genetic monitoring of large-mammal community reassembly

  NSF · $2.5M · 2023–2027

• Predation, Competition, and Establishment Dynamics within an Insular Adaptive Radiation

  NSF · $883k · 2015–2021

Frequent coauthors

• Todd M. Palmer

  University of Cape Town

  150 shared

• Jacob R. Goheen

  Wyoming Department of Education

  128 shared

• Hillary S. Young

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  79 shared

• Truman P. Young

  University of California, Davis

  71 shared

• Tyler R. Kartzinel

  Providence College

  66 shared

• Rodolfo Dirzo

  Stanford University

  41 shared

• Johan Pansu

  Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1

  40 shared

• Roșie Woodroffe

  Zoological Society of London

  36 shared

Labs

• The Pringle LabPI

Education

• Ph.D.

  Stanford University

  2009

• M.Sc.

  Oxford University

  2004

• M.Sc.

  University of Oxford

  2003

• B.A.

  University of Pennsylvania

  2001

Similar researchers at Princeton University

• David Wilcoveh-85
• C. Jessica E. Metcalfh-78
• Jonathan Levineh-75