U of A leads all universities in 2026 Ecological Society of America honors
Don Falk samples a Sierra lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta var. murrayana), a tree common at mid- and upper elevations in the Sierra Nevada.
Image courtesy of Don Falk.
The University of Arizona was recognized in three separate categories at the Ecological Society of America, or ESA, annual meeting in Salt Lake City on July 27. No other institution received as many awards at this year’s meeting.
While the three honorees work on different questions, their research converges on the same ambition: making ecology precise enough to forecast.
Brian Enquist
Brian Enquist — MacArthur Award
Brian Enquist, plant ecologist and macroecologist in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, received the Robert H. MacArthur Award for Meritorious Contributions by a Mid-Career Ecologist. His science connects the traits of individual organisms such as leaf size, wood density and growth rate to how entire communities and ecosystems function. The Society credits him with helping make science more predictive and trait-based and with fostering an international research community.
Enquist is also an investigator with the Lovejoy Center for Bridging Biodiversity, Conservation Science, and Policy, part of the university's Arizona Institute for Resilience, where he tackles interdisciplinary challenges spanning conservation, biodiversity, human health and societal wellbeing.
Margaret Evans — Mercer Award
Margaret Evans
Margaret Evans, associate professor in the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, shared the George Mercer Award for an Outstanding Paper by an Early Career Researcher. She and her coauthors built a model that forecasts how western U.S. tree species will respond to climate change.
The award-winning 2023 paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, tested an assumption ecologists have long relied on: that if you want to know how a species will fare in a warmer future, you can look at how it fares today in places that are already warmer. Using tree-ring records from ponderosa pine across the West, Evans and her coauthors found the assumption doesn't work.
“This causes us to doubt certain predictions about ecological responses to climate change including, for example, the prediction that warming will improve carbon sequestration in some forests,” she said.
Don Falk
Don Falk — ESA Fellow
Don Falk, professor in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment and the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, was one of eight ecologists elected to the society's fellowship this year, a lifetime distinction.
Falk studies fire history, fire ecology and ecological resilience: how landscapes absorb disturbance, and when they don't. The Ecological Society cited that work as central to understanding adaptation in a rapidly changing world.
"Ecosystems around the world are in a state of great flux, and in many cases their trajectories are unknown and difficult to predict,” Falk said. “Our focus is on understanding how populations, species and ecological communities are responding to a world with a different climate and altered disturbance regimes, such as wildland fire."
The society's announcements are available on its website: the 2026 fellows and the 2026 award recipients.