Robert K. Colwell

Robert K. Colwell is an American evolutionary ecologist, biogeographer, biodiversity scientist, and tropical biologist. He is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut and Museum Curator Adjoint in Entomology and Zoology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. An expert in biodiversity statistics, Colwell is a developer of methods for estimating species richness from incomplete data and is best known for the mid-domain effect and for inventing and developing widely-used software tools in biodiversity informatics.

Early life and education Colwell is the younger of two children of Robert Pulliam Colwell, a public-school principal and rancher, and Eleanor Knight Colwell, a concert flutist and amateur naturalist. In 1966, he worked as a curatorial assistant in ethnobotany under Richard Evans Schultes at Harvard. under the supervision of Lawrence Slobodkin. He was a Ford Foundation Fellow at the University of Chicago from 1969 to 1970, working with Monte Lloyd and Richard Levins.

Other professional work Colwell served on the Board of Reviewing Editors of the journal Science from 2002 to 2005. and has served in various editorial roles for other journals. The mid-domain effect (MDE). With George Hurtt, Colwell demonstrated that species diversity may peak in the center of bounded geographical domains when species ranges are randomly distributed. Biodiversity statistics. Colwell collaborated extensively with Jonathan Coddington, Anne Chao, and Nicholas Gotelli to develop statistical methods for estimating species richness from sampling data. Biodiversity informatics. He co-directed Project ALAS, a long-term tropical arthropod diversity inventory in Costa Rica and developed the biodiversity database software Biota. Climate-driven range shifts. In 2008, Colwell and colleagues published research predicting upslope range shifts of tropical species under climate warming and lowland biotic attrition.

Selected publications

Honors and awards Colwell has received numerous professional honors. He served as President of the American Society of Naturalists in 1998 and received the President's Award from the society in 2001. He was Vice President of the Ecological Society of America from 1994 to 1995 and received the ESA Distinguished Service Award in 1999. He was elected Fellow of the Ecological Society of America in 2012.

He is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the California Academy of Sciences, and the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering.