Photo-Credit: Shubha Tuljapurkar (more on her web and Instangram)
We focus on concepts and theory for population & evolutionary dynamics, uncertainty & risk, understanding the past and predicting the future.
We study many species including:
Tropical understory plants
Marmots
Roe deer
Guppies
Temperate plants
Soay sheep
Humans
Our Recent Papers
When to claim a pension: the effect of uncertainty in ages at death
Biocultural vulnerability of traditional crops in the Indian Trans-Himalaya
Density dependence shapes life‐history trade‐offs in a food‐limited population
Temporal variability can promote migration between habitats
Understanding the conditions that promote the evolution of migration is important in ecology and evolution. When environments are fixed and there is one most favorable site, migration to other sites lowers overall growth rate and is not favored. Here we ask, can environmental variability favor
Hurricanes and other extreme events
Extreme events significantly impact ecosystems and are predicted to increase in frequency and/or magnitude with climate change. We introduce Generalized extreme value (GEV) distributions for ecologically relevant events, including hurricanes and wildfires,. We show how to downscale a GEV for
Aging is a traveling wave
We show, for five decades in 20 developed countries, that old-age survival follows an advancing front, like a traveling wave. The front lies between the 25th and 90th percentiles of old-age deaths, advancing with nearly constant long-term shape but annual fluctuations in speed. Our unexpected result
Blog & In The News
Lifespan is uncertain, even for well-informed individuals. Sha Jiang, Wenyun Zuo, Zhen Guo and Shripad Tuljapurkar show that this irreducible demographic risk increases with delayed pension claiming and hits male and low-income groups harder. Early claiming, often seen as suboptimal, may be a rational response to unavoidable uncertainty.
Lab graduate student, Harman Jaggi, discovered a nearly forgotten variety of black peas from the northwest Himalayas that excels in climate resilience and nutrition. Check here for the news.
A winner of the Young Author Award 2021
Our article “Relative contributions of fixed and dynamic heterogeneity to variation in lifetime reproductive success in kestrels (Falco tinnunculus)" published in Population Ecology has been selected by the nomination committee of the Society of Population Ecology as an excellent paper. It has been chosen as a winner of the Young Author Award 2021.
A course on chili peppers covers history, anthropology, biology, and culture, and includes a visit to a specialty pepper farm in East Palo Alto.
Lalita du Perron talks to Shripad “Tulja” Tuljapurkar, Professor of Biology at Stanford, about his work on demographics, his love of food, and his undergraduate class on the chili pepper.
Shripad Tuljapurkar was awarded the Sustainability Accelerator award for working on the research and social dimensions of wildlife conservation in the northwest Trans Himalaya. We believe human and natural capital are inextricably linked- not only through shared land-use and ecosystem services but also through their vulnerabilities to processes of change.