KBS trio earns award for outstanding research paper

The Ecological Society of America, or ESA, singled out three W.K. Kellogg Biological Station researchers with their 2025 Outstanding Ecological Theory Paper award. Lead author Jonas Wickman, a postdoctoral research associate and co-authors Elena Litchman and Christopher Klausmeier, MSU Foundation Professors and resident KBS faculty members, were recognized for their paper, titled “Eco-evolutionary emergence of macroecological scaling in plankton communities.”

About the paper

In the paper, Klausmeier, Litchman and Wickman tackle the fundamental challenge of scaling up the processes governing relationships at the individual level –such as cell volume and size, respiration, or affinity for Nitrogen– to explain patterns at the population, community, and ecosystem levels – such as between prey and predator densities, functional traits, or ecosystem function. While often invoked, this individual-to-ecosystems scaling up is rarely achieved in practice.

The authors accomplished this goal through an eco-evolutionary model with elegant predictions tested with empirical data. In showing that meaningful scaling-up across levels of biological organization requires accounting for both ecological and evolutionary processes, this paper addresses a long-standing issue in ecology, yields novel testable predictions, and stands out as one that should guide new scientific inquiry by current and future scholars of theoretical ecology.

ESA’s announcement said, in part, “At a time when our sense of wonder and awe for the natural world seems overshadowed by multiple environmental and societal challenges –both real and manufactured– this paper is a testament to the enduring power of the scientific endeavor, and to our collective ability to continue addressing the most fundamental questions in biology through novel theoretical approaches, despite all odds.”