Carla D

Departmental Chair & Schuyler Professor

dantonio@es.ucsb.edu

Bren Hall 4002

D'Antonio Lab Website

Specialization

Plant and Ecosystem Ecology, Invasive Species, Species Affects on Ecosystem Processes, and Restoration Ecology.

Faculty in Environmental Studies and EEMB Departments 

Education

  • Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara

Bio

Dr. Carla D'Antonio's teaching is in the area of ecology and the application of ecological knowledge to environmental problem solving. She is particularly passionate about teaching courses that get students out into the field to evaluate real world ecosystem management problems and to apply knowledge used in the Bio

Teaching: Dr. Carla D'Antonio's teaching is in the area of ecology and the application of ecological knowledge to environmental problem-solving. She is particularly passionate about teaching courses that get students out into the field to evaluate real-world ecosystem or species management problems and to apply knowledge acquired in the classroom to solving conservation problems.  Her field course ES/EEMB 119, involves field trips each week to visit a variety of ecosystem and measure things about those systems. Students meet with managersto hear first hand about the challenges and conflicts they face balancing human uses with species conservation. Other teaching includes Foundations of Ecosystem Restoration and Fire Ecology both of which also have a strong field component.

Campus activities:  D'Antonio is the Environmental Studies Departmental Chair and is on the oversight committee of the Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration (CCBER) and on the Science Advisory Committee for the North Campus Open Space restoration project. She is also on the UCSB Natural Reserve System?s oversight committees, and serves as the Faculty Representative for Sedgwick Reserve. She is active on the ES Planning Committee and the ES Bren-Joint Affairs Committee and the Greenhouse Committee. 

Research

Dr. Carla D'Antonio's research focus has been to understand processes that control invasions by non-indigenous species into ecological communities and how and when the addition of some individual species affects ecosystem structure and functioning. She seeks a mechanistic understanding of ecological patterns and process and although she works primarily at the community and ecosystem levels, she also examines individual plant and population processes. She believes that such an integrated approach is the best way to answer questions about the importance of individual species and how communities and ecosystems will change with increasing human population pressure, increasing movement of plant species, nitrogen deposition and climatic fluctuations. She also tries to link research questions and findings to the restoration or of community and ecosystem processes in degraded ecosystems.

 

Research in her laboratory has focused on understanding both controls over vegetation change and plant dominance from local to landscape levels. Her students work in chaparral, grassland and vernal pool ecosystems and she continues to work with students and collaborators in Hawaii on factors inhibiting forest recovery after the cessation of livestock grazing. Her work and that of her students integrates with land managers at the UC NRS sites, Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge in Hawaii, and with the USFS. 

 

Some specific projects near Santa Barbara include collaborative work on plant community responses to wildfire and invasive grasses in California chaparral, factors impeding natural recovery of chaparral after degradation due to too much fire, and factors influencing recovery of the endemic conifer Pseudotsuga macrocarpa after fire and drought.  At Sedgwick she maintains plots in the international Nutrient network study http://www.nutnet.umn.edu).  Annually she measure biomass and compositional responses to N, P and micronutrient fertilization as well as maintaining a litter manipulation and native plant seeding experiment that is cross with the fertilization treatments.  She also maintains a site in Sedgwick grasslands that are part of the International Drought Experiment (https://wp.natsci.colostate.edu/droughtnet/activities/international-drou...). 

Publications

Most Cited Publications

D'Antonio, C. and P. Vitousek.  1992.  Biological invasions by exotic grasses, the grass-fire cycle, and global change.  Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 23:63-88. (most cited)

Vitousek, P., C.M. D’Antonio, L.L. Loope, M. Rejmanek and R. Westbrooks. 1997.  Introduced species: A significant component of human-caused global change.  New Zealand J. Ecol. 21: 1-16.(>1000 citations).

Richardson, D.M., N. Allsopp, C.M. D’Antonio, S. Milton and M. Rejmanek.  2000. Plant invasions—the role of mutualisms.Biological Reviews, 75:65-93. (>1000 citations).

Levine, J. and C.M. D'Antonio. 1999. Elton revisited: a review of evidence linking diversity and invasability. Oikos 87: 15-26. (>1000 Citations)

Recent Publications:

D’Antonio, C.M., S.G. Yelenik and M.C. Mack. 2017. Ecosystem versus community recovery 25 years after grass invasions and fire in a subtropical woodland. J. Ecology105: 1462-1474.

D’Antonio, C.M., R. Ostertag, S. Cordell and S. Yelenik. 2017. Interactions among invasive plant species: Lessons from Hawai’i. Annual Rev. Ecol. Syst.48:521-541.

D’Antonio, C.M. and L. Flory. 2017.  Long-term dynamics and impacts of plant invasion. J. Ecology105: 

Yelenik, S., C.M. D’Antonio and E. August-Schmidt.  2017. The influence of soil resources and plant traits on invasion and restoration of a subtropical woodland. Plant Ecology 218: 1149-1161.

Strayer, D., C.M. D’Antonio and 15 other authors. 2018. Boom bust Boom-bust dynamics in biological invasions: definition, causes and detection. Ecology Letters20: 1337-1350

Chen, Bao-Ming, C.M. D’Antonio, N. Molinari and S. Peng. 2018. Mechanisms of invasion of invasive grass litter on germination and growth of coexisting species in California. Biological invasions20:1881-1897.

Please click here for a full list of Dr. D'Antonio's publications

Courses

ES 100: Environmental Ecology
ES/EEMB 119: Ecology and Management of CA Wildlands
ES/EEMB 128: Foundations of Ecosystem Restoration
ES/EEMB 595: Plant Ecology Research Seminar