Luis Santiago-Rosario, PRODiG+ Fellow

Ecological stoichiometry, plant ecology, and plant–animal interactions

Email: luis.santiagorosario@stonybrook.edu

Office: LS677A

Research Summary:

Organisms live within complex chemical environments that shape their physiology, interactions, and distributions. Yet these chemical landscapes are increasingly being altered by global change, including urbanization, pollution, nutrient enrichment, and other forms of human-driven environmental change. My research seeks to understand how variation in the availability and distribution of elements shapes ecological interactions, and how these relationships scale from individual organisms to communities and across geographic regions.

At the core of my work, I integrate chemical ecology, ecological stoichiometry, global change biology, and natural history to investigate how organisms acquire, regulate, and respond to chemical resources. I am particularly interested in elements that are essential but often overlooked in ecological research (such as microelements), and in understanding how anthropogenic environments create new chemical conditions that influence species interactions and community assembly. Urban ecosystems provide powerful natural laboratories for examining these processes because they generate strong and spatially heterogeneous gradients in nutrients, pollutants, and other elements.

Parasitic plants, particularly mistletoes, provide a complementary system for exploring these questions across ecological and geographic scales. Because mistletoes acquire water and nutrients directly from their hosts, they offer a unique opportunity to investigate how consumers track, accumulate, or regulate resources obtained from other organisms. By combining field studies, elemental chemistry, experiments, large biodiversity datasets, and comparative and macroecological approaches, I investigate how host chemistry shapes parasitic plants, how mistletoe-host interactions vary across environments, and how climate, geography, and evolutionary history structure these interactions globally.

Together, these approaches allow us to connect processes occurring within individual plant-consumer interactions to broader patterns of biodiversity and global change. Ultimately, my research goal is to develop a more mechanistic understanding of how environmental chemistry structures ecological systems and how rapidly changing chemical landscapes will reshape species interactions and communities in the future.