Owen Lewis

Research Interests

I am a community ecologist and conservation biologist. My interest is in the processes that maintain, structure and threaten biodiversity, particularly in highly diverse tropical forest ecosystems. My current research areas include the impact of human activities (including fragmentation and commercial timber extraction) on the diversity and functioning of tropical forest ecosystems; the structure and dynamics of food webs involving plants, insect herbivores and their parasitoids; the role of plant pathogens and insect herbivores in structuring and maintaining the high diversity of tropical plants; and the impact of climate change, habitat fragmentation and degradation on interspecific interactions.

I also have a longstanding interest in the ecology and conservation of butterflies, and am coordinating the new global IUCN Red List Index for butterflies Full details of publications, reprints and research group are available here.

Other Interests

I co-edited the volume Insect Conservation Biology, published in 2007 by the Royal Entomological Society and CABI Publishing. I am an associate editor for the journals Insect Conservation and Diversity, Journal of Applied Ecology and Ecological Entormology and a member of the NERC Peer Review College. I was awarded the Founders' Prize of the British Ecological Society in 2010.

Contacts

Selected Publications

• Bagchi, R., Swinfield, S., Gallery, R.E., Lewis, O.T., Gripenberg, S., Narayan, L., Freckleton, R.P. (2010). Testing the Janzen-Connell mechanism: pathogens cause overcompensating density dependence in a tropical tree. Ecology Letters, doi: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2010.01520.x
• Staniczenko, P.P., Lewis, O.T., Jones, N.S. & Reed-Tsochas, F. (2010). Structural dynamics and robustness of food webs. Ecology Letters, 13: 891–899.
• Klapwijk, M.J., Gröbler, B.C., Ward, K., Wheeler, D. & Lewis, O.T. (2009). Influence of experimental warming and shading on host-parasitoid synchrony. Global Change Biology, 16:102-112.
• Paniagua, M.R., Medianero, E. & Lewis, O.T. (2009). Structure and vertical stratification of plant galler - parasitoid food webs in two tropical forests. Ecological Entomology, 34: 310-332.
• Lewis, O.T. (2009). Biodiversity change and ecosystem function in tropical forests. Basic and Applied Ecology, 10, 97-102.
• Tylianakis, J.M., Tscharntke, T. & Lewis, O.T. (2007) Habitat modification alters the structure of tropical host-parasitoid food webs. Nature, 445, 202-205