The Ecological Society of America (ESA) announced today that professor Nathan J. Sanders, Director of the Environmental Program in the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, has been elected a fellow in the organization.

In giving this lifetime award, the ESA noted that Sanders was elected for his remarkable contributions to “increasing understanding about causes and consequences of biodiversity change in terrestrial ecosystems by linking community, ecosystem, and macroecological approaches using observations and experiments from local to global scales.”

The “fellowship program recognizes the many ways in which its members contribute to ecological research and discovery, communication, education and pedagogy, and management and policy,” the society said in a release. “Fellows are members who have made outstanding contributions to a wide range of fields served by ESA, including, but not restricted to, those that advance or apply ecological knowledge in academics, government, non-profit organizations, and the broader society.”

Sanders was part of a distinguished group of twenty-eight ESA fellows elected this year that included scientists from Duke, Cornell, UC Berkeley, the EPA, Purdue, the National Science Foundation, and other leading institutions. 

"My students, collaborators, and I work at the intersection of community ecology, ecosystem ecology, and macroecology, with an explicit focus on the consequences of global change," Sanders notes in his profile. "Specific areas of inquiry focus on the effects of climate change in mountain ecosystems around the world, the cascading consequences of sodium limitation in terrestrial ecosystems, and many aspects of the ecology of ants."

The Ecological Society of America was founded in 1915 and is the world’s largest community of professional ecologists.