Tom Bell

Research Interests

My research focuses on the processes that determine the composition and diversity of ecological communities, and their consequences for ecosystem functioning.

As with all fields of biology, community ecology requires model systems to understand general principles. For this reason, I work chiefly with the microbial communities that inhabit water-filled treeholes. Water-filled treeholes are "natural microcosms" that house an array of heterotrophic organisms that feed directly or indirectly on leaf litter. By focusing on the microbial communities that inhabit this discrete ecosystem, it is possible to conduct relatively controlled manipulations of natural communities over reasonable scales of time and space.

I am particularly interested in understanding how constructed communities of naturally co-occurring micro-organisms influence ecosystem processes. Ongoing projects also include searching for physical and biological correlates of microbial community structure, and conducting laboratory and field experiments as well as computer simulations to understand the processes that underlie the observed patterns

Other Interests

Along with my research, I also lecture to the first and second year undergraduates on the Populations and Evolution and Systematics courses, and coordinate a course on Experiment Design for the M.Sc. students.

Contacts

Selected Publications

• Brockhurst, MA, ME Hochberg, T Bell, A Buckling. 2006. Local competition can favour cooperation. Current Biology 16: 2030-2034
• Bell, T., R.P. Freckleton, and O.T. Lewis. 2006. Plant pathogens drive density-dependent seedling mortality in a tropical tree. Ecology Letters 9: 569-574
• Bell, T, JA Newman, AK Lilley, and C van der Gast. 2005. Bacteria and island biogeography [Response]. Science 309: 1997-1998
• Bell, T, JA Newman, BS Silverman, SL Turner, and AK Lilley.2005. The contribution of species richness and composition to bacterial services. Nature 436: 1157-1160
• Bell, T, D Ager, J-I Song, JA Newman, IP Thompson, AK Lilley, van der Gast, C. 2005. Larger islands house more diverse bacterial communities. Science 308: 1884