Three Papers That Influenced The Direction of My Career

Abstract

As a junior at San Diego State University I was impressed by a massive wildfire that generated an extraordinary spectacle from the back porch of my parent’s home in the formerly rural community of Bonita. During my senior year I came across a paper by Philip Wells (Wells 1969) on the evolution of plant life history strategies and fire. His model was rather counterintuitive in that he pointed out that nearly all woody dicotyledenous species were able to vegetatively resprout after fire (or other disturbances), and the lack of resprouting capacity was rare and found primarily in fire-prone chaparral shrubs in the genera Arctostaphylos and Ceanothus. I talked with one of my professors, Dr. Paul Zedler, about doing a masters degree on this phenomenon. To this day I recall his note of caution, given in a very serious tone (to paraphrase), “Well Jon, one does not set out in a graduate program to just study whales, you need to narrow your ideas.” My eventual project led to a life-long career that included life history evolution in response to fires, and it is still an important part of my research program (Pausas and Keeley, in review). My master’s thesis project was published (Keeley 1977, Keeley and Zedler 1978) and these papers have been widely cited (collectively nearly 600 citations) and appear to have played a role in stimulating several synthesis papers addressing the drivers behind resprouting and seeding evolution (Bellingham and Sparrow 2000, Bond and Midgley 2003) and brought home to me the excitement of linking ecology and evolution. While working on my master’s thesis I accepted an offer to participate as a field assistant on Dr. Harold Mooney’s NFS/IBP convergent evolution study, comparing the structure and function of mediterreanean climate ecosystems in California and Chile. Mooney and Dunn (1970) stressed an ecophysiological model to explain the convergence of evergreen sclerophyllous-leaved shrubs in mediterranean-climate environments of California and Chile, and further opened my eyes to the connections between ecology and evolution. For my job I traveled once a week to study sites around southern California to record phenological stages of chaparral species. My job title was “quantitative phenologist” and most people assumed it had something to do with studying human skull morphology; little did we recognize that future climate change threats would induce ecologists around the globe into becoming quantitative phenologists. In this project I developed a friendship with Sterling Carter, who was doing graduate studies in Chile, and her advisor Dr. Al Johnson felt that a good use of his funds would be to send me to Chile to collect seeds for planned cytological studies. Since I had spent the previous summer in the Arctic tundra doing research for Dr. Frank Pitelka, I could couple this with a trip to Tierra del Fuego to make some “comparisons” with southern hemisphere tundra. While I believe the money was well spent, the trip did not lead to any publications, but it did provide a first-hand look at the systems Mooney and Dunn (1970) had written on, and instilled in me the need to think broadly in terms of other mediterraneanclimate ecosystems. These early experiences enabled me to develop colleagues in all MTC regions; this circumstance is reflected in a recent multi-authored book (Keeley et al 2012). Finishing my master’s thesis, I discussed with Dr. Zedler doing a Ph.D. and I recall him saying, again in a very serious (but I now recognized as a somewhat affected tone) something to the effect, ‘Well Jon,