Serguei Saavedra

About

Serguei Saavedra was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with Tenure effective July 1. His research seeks to understand the emergence, sustainability, and transformations of ecological systems under changing environments. His lab develops quantifiable and predictive tools to know if a group of species will have the capacity to adapt in a new environment and therefore assess which parts of an ecosystem (from megaherbivores to bacteria) are most threatened by climate change.

Research topics

• Biology
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Ecology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Botany
• Data science
• Epistemology
• Environmental resource management
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Information arms race explains plant-herbivore chemical communication in ecological communities

  Science · 2020 · 102 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Plants emit an extraordinary diversity of chemicals that provide information about their identity and mediate their interactions with insects. However, most studies of this have focused on a few model species in controlled environments, limiting our capacity to understand plant-insect chemical communication in ecological communities. Here, by integrating information theory with ecological and evolutionary theories, we show that a stable information structure of plant volatile organic compounds (…

  DOI

• Towards a Probabilistic Understanding About the Context-Dependency of Species Interactions

  Trends in Ecology & Evolution · 2020 · 79 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Experimental evidence of the importance of multitrophic structure for species persistence

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021 · 64 citations

  Ecological theory predicts that species interactions embedded in multitrophic networks shape the opportunities for species to persist. However, the lack of experimental support of this prediction has limited our understanding of how species interactions occurring within and across trophic levels simultaneously regulate the maintenance of biodiversity. Here, we integrate a mathematical approach and detailed experiments in plant-pollinator communities to demonstrate the need to jointly account for…

  DOI

• Untangling the complexity of priority effects in multispecies communities

  Ecology Letters · 2021 · 45 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  The history of species immigration can dictate how species interact in local communities, thereby causing historical contingency in community assembly. Since immigration history is rarely known, these historical influences, or priority effects, pose a major challenge in predicting community assembly. Here, we provide a graph-based, non-parametric, theoretical framework for understanding the predictability of community assembly as affected by priority effects. To develop this framework, we first…

  DOI

• Fundamental constraints to the logic of living systems

  Interface Focus · 2024-10-25 · 27 citations

  reviewOpen access

  It has been argued that the historical nature of evolution makes it a highly path-dependent process. Under this view, the outcome of evolutionary dynamics could have resulted in organisms with different forms and functions. At the same time, there is ample evidence that convergence and constraints strongly limit the domain of the potential design principles that evolution can achieve. Are these limitations relevant in shaping the fabric of the possible? Here, we argue that fundamental constraint…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• EAGER: Bioforecasting: understanding and predicting species persistence in ecological communities under changing environments

  NSF · $199k · 2020–2023

Frequent coauthors

• Chuliang Song

  University of California, Los Angeles

  41 shared

• Rudolf P. Rohr

  University of Fribourg

  41 shared

• Ricard V. Solé

  39 shared

• Jordi Bascompte

  University of Zurich

  26 shared

• Yang‐Yu Liu

  Harvard University

  16 shared

• Artemy Kolchinsky

  15 shared

• Brian Uzzi

  McCormick (United States)

  15 shared

• Andrea Tabi

  University of Amsterdam

  15 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Engineering Science

  Oxford University

  2010

Similar researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Eric J. Almh-125
• Markus J. Buehlerh-121
• Dara Entekhabih-94