About Dr. Wise's Research

I joined the UIC community in November 2006 as a Professor of Biological Sciences and an affiliated researcher in the Institute for Environmental Science and Policy (IESP).

My research program seeks to understand the causes and ecological implications of food-web complexity and explores how human-induced impacts, such as global climate change and habitat modification, will affect the functioning of terrestrial food webs. Many controversies in ecology continue because we are largely ignorant of the functional consequences of biodiversity. For example: What is the relationship between species diversity and the number, complexity and strength of pathways of direct and indirect effects in food webs? How do species interactions in complex food webs affect ecosystem processes such as primary production and litter decomposition? Much of my research program is part of the emerging interface between community and ecosystem ecology.

My students and I rely on a broad range of approaches: field experimentation, behavioral experiments in the laboratory, multivariate analyses of field surveys, stable isotope analyses to investigate trophic structure and connections between sub-webs, immunological and molecular techniques to identify predator-prey interactions in the field, meta-analyses of published studies, and mathematical modeling.

Before coming to UIC, I focused on arthropod-dominated food webs of the forest floor and small-scale agroecosystems. I am continuing my basic research on the ecology of food webs, and also am expanding the scope of my program to include research central to UIC's NSF-IGERT interdisciplinary graduate training program in the ecology, management and restoration of integrated human/natural landscapes --- LEAP (“Landscape, Ecological and Anthropogenic Processes”). My students and I will be investigating food-web structure and functioning in the context of habitat fragmentation, invasive species, and ecological restoration in diverse Chicagoland landscapes, e.g. forests, prairie, wetlands and urban gardens.

Representative Publications

Castro, A. and D. H. Wise. 2009. Influence of fine woody debris on spider diversity and community structure in forest leaf litter. Biodiversity and Conservation. Pre-publication on line (Biodivers Conserv DOI 10.1007/s10531-009-9674-7)

Rabaneda-Bueno, R., M. A. Rodríguez-Gironés, S. Aguado de la Paz, C. Fernández-Montraveta, D. H. Wise and J. Moya-Laraño. 2008. Sexual cannibalism: High incidence in a natural population with benefits to females. PLoS ONE 3(10): e3484 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003484.

Birkhofer, K., A. Fließbach, D. H. Wise and S. Scheu. 2008. Generalist predators in organically and conventionally managed grass-clover fields: implications for conservation biological control. Annals of Applied Biology 153: 271-280.

Harwood, J. D., M. R. Bostrom, E. E Hladilek, D. H. Wise and J. J. Obrycki. 2007. An order-specific monoclonal antibody to Diptera reveals the impact of alternative prey on spider feeding behavior in a complex food web. Biological Control 41: 397-407.

Lensing, J. R. and D. H. Wise. 2007. Impact of changes in rainfall amounts predicted by climate-change models on decomposition in a deciduous forest. Applied Soil Ecology 35: 523-534.

Lensing, J. R. and D. H. Wise. 2006. Predicted climate change alters a trophic cascade that affects an ecosystem process. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 103: 15502-15505.

Wise, D. H., D. M. Moldenhauer and J. Halaj. 2006. Using stable isotopes to reveal shifts in prey consumption by generalist predators. Ecological Applications 16: 865-876.