Welcome Fall Term Visiting Faculty Jesse Bellemare

Jesse Bellemare has joined Conway’s faculty for the fall term, teaching a weekly ecology class.

The fall term ecology class introduces students to the field of ecology, with an emphasis on concepts and applications relevant to understanding vegetation and landscape ecology. The class starts “from the ground up”, with consideration of how physical and abiotic factors, like geology, soils, and climate, influence the composition and structure of vegetation and ecological communities. During weekly field sessions, the students will investigate local ecological communities and the landscapes of western Massachusetts as “case studies” to develop skills in observing and documenting important ecological patterns and processes in the field, and understanding how they relate to organizing concepts and theories in ecology.

Jesse is an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Smith College whose research focuses on questions in plant ecology, biogeography, and evolution at a variety of spatial and temporal scales, largely centered on the temperate deciduous forests of the eastern United States. In particular, he is interested in how historical processes, such as past climate change and dispersal limitation, might influence plant species’ contemporary distributions and the diversity of plant communities. This line of research has implications for species conservation in the face of modern climate change, including the appropriateness of managed relocation for plant species unlikely to keep pace with anthropogenic climate change. Locally, he is involved in an ongoing study of forest ecosystem ecology and change at Smith College’s Ada and Archibald MacLeish Field Station in Conway, investigating how forest ecosystems might be changed as a dominant evergreen conifer species, the Eastern hemlock, declines due to attack by exotic insects.

We are excited to have the opportunity to work with Jesse this fall!