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
Bloomberg Getting old can be hard under any circumstances, and harder still when you’re poor. That’s the predicament for Thailand, the developing country first in line to face the consequences of a first-world-style baby bust. Data published last month by the United Nations show births in Thailand have dropped to a level on par with Switzerland and Finland, two ultra-wealthy countries with which it has almost nothing else in common.
Live Science Aging is determined by biological, not environmental, factors, a study suggests. No matter how hard you try, it might be difficult to slow down aging, a depressing new study suggests. Across a range of primate species, including humans, aging rates are mostly determined by biological factors, not environmental ones.
The New York Times The New York Times featured an article about our work on “The Dynamics of Phenotypic Change and the Shrinking Sheep of St. Kilda,” Ozgul, A., S. Tuljapurkar, T. G. Benton, J. M. Pemberton, T. H.Clutton-Brock and T. Coulson, published in Science (325, 464-467, 2009).
The benefits of increased lifespans could come at the cost of greater societal burdens. Biologist says expectancy may soon be 100. People much older than Weinstein could become the norm, said Stanford University biology and demographics Professor Shripad Tuljapurkar. He believes medical advances in anti-aging technologies could increase Americans' average life expectancy in the near future from just under 80 years to 100. Society needs to consider the possibility, Tuljapurkar argues, because the implications for programs like Social Security are mind bending.