Rachael Winfree is a Professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. The goal of her work is to better understand the causes and consequences of biodiversity, particularly in real-world settings and at large spatial scales. Current projects in her research group include (1) the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem services, (2) biodiversity measurement, (3) plant-pollinator networks, and (4) pollinator conservation and restoration. Her work has been funded primarily by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and has been published in leading scientific journals including Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Ecology Letters, and Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. From 2015-2019 she was one of approximately 170 scientists worldwide (and one of approximately 20 women) on the list of highly cited researchers in the field of environment / ecology. Rachael is a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America and serves on the board of directors of the Xerces Society, which has the largest pollinator conservation effort of any nonprofit. She received her Ph.D. in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University in 2001 and her B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1990.
Publications:
*Smith, C, *T Harrison, J Gardner, and R Winfree. 2021. Forest-associated bees persist amid forest loss and regrowth in eastern North America. Biological Conservation pdf
*Roswell, M E, J Dushoff, and R Winfree. 2021. Editor’s Choice / Forum: A conceptual guide to measuring species diversity. Oikos 130: 321-338 pdf
Senapathi, D and 57 other authors including *F Benjamin, *D Cariveau, *T Harrison, and R Winfree. 2021. Wild insect diversity increases inter- annual stability in global crop pollinator communities. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 288: 20210212 pdf
Caradonna, P J, L A Burkle, B Schwarz, J Resasco, T M Knight, G Benadi, N Bluthgen, C F Dormann, Q Fang, J Frund, B Gauzens, C N Kaiser-Bunbury, R Winfree, and D P Vazquez. 2021. Seeing through the static: the temporal dimensions of plant-animal mutualistic interactions. Ecology Letters 24: 149-161 pdf
*Genung, M A, J Fox, and R Winfree. 2020. Species richness drives ecosystem function in experiments, but in nature its importance varies with dominance. Global Ecology and Biogeography 29: 1531-1541 pdf
*Reilly, J R, et al. 2020. Crop production in the USA is frequently limited by a lack of pollinators. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 287: 20200922 pdf
Winfree, R. 2020. How does biodiversity relate to ecosystem functioning in natural ecosystems? Pages 338-353 in B. Holt, D. Tilman, and A.P. Dobson, eds, Unsolved Problems in Ecology. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ USA
*MacLeod, M, *J Reilly, *D Cariveau, *M Genung, *M Roswell, J Gibbs, and R Winfree. 2020. How much do rare and crop-pollinating bees overlap in identity and flower preferences? Journal of Applied Ecology 57: 413-423 pdf
*Roswell, M, J Dushoff, J Gibbs, and R Winfree. 2019. Male and female bees show large differences in floral preference. Plos One 14(4), e0214909 pdf Highlight in Science
*Smith, C, *L Weinman, J Gibbs, and R Winfree. 2019. Specialist foragers in forest bee communities are small, social, or emerge early. Journal of Animal Ecology 88: 1158-1167 pdf
*Harrison, T, J Gibbs, R Winfree. 2019. Anthropogenic landscapes support fewer rare bee species. Landscape Ecology 34: 967-978 pdf
