The Ecological Society of America (ESA) has awarded Lynette and Ryan the George Mercer Award for their paper testing theories of community assembly using an experiment on intertidal communities in Singapore (Loke & Chisholm 2023). The George Mercer Award was established in 1948 and is given annually for an outstanding ecological research paper published in the last two years whose lead author is under 40. The ESA announcement wrote, “Deftly integrating field experiments with clear hypotheses and mathematical modeling, this study provides novel insights into an ecological question that has been debated for decades. The results of the paper advance our understanding of the forces structuring ecological communities, and the authors combine theory and empirical evidence in a creative and exceptionally well-written way.”

Lynette has collaborated with our lab on several projects in recent years. She moved to the University of Melbourne last year to start a spatial and community ecology lab.