Cam Webb :: Research

Primary research questions

What are the ecological and evolutionary causes of high tree species diversity in tropical rain forests?
How do we integrate rapidly-accumulating phylogenetic information into community ecology and historical biogeography, in particular to reconstruct the historical assembly of and species evolution in Malesian forests?
What would a new model of systematics look like that even stands a chance at dealing with all the uncollected (and collected) tropical diversity; how can we incorporate molecular markers, morphological image processing, text processing and GIS-based niche modelling in to a workable solution for Indonesia?
How do we restore diverse forest on deforested tropical land?

Combining (new) molecular phylogenies of selected, Malesian tree clades with plot-based assessments of their ecological characters, to reconstruct ecological evolution in a rapidly shifting archipelago (with numerous Indonesian and other collaborators).
Distance- and phylogeny-based pathogen transmission in forest communities (with Greg Gilbert, PI, and Karen Garrett; NSF Grant DEB-0515520).
Simulating historical biogeography: new methods for origins and routes (with Michael Donoghue).
DNA Barcoding trees in the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, Singapore (with Shawn Lum and Adrian Loo).
Changes in Tertiary plant community diversity estimated from pollen counts in ocean-bottom rock cores (with Bob Morley).
Extinction of lowland tree species on Java (with Ismail Rachman).
Carbon-accounting incentives for replanting with native taxa around the Gunung Palung National Park, West Kalimantan (with Kinari Webb).

Publications. I use JabRef to manage my references, and it produces this nicely formatted output. The URLs or DOIs link to PDFs for most papers. You can also grab the BibTeX citation.
Software.
Data.

How can beneficial effects of medicinal plants be statistically assessed while being used as treatments (out of necessity) in rural tropical areas?
How do we integrate the emerging understanding of the evolutionary basis of the human mind and social behaviour into our contemporay ethical framework, and can we develop a biologically-grounded ethics of the environment without falling into the `naturalistic fallacy?'