Burnside, William

Burnside, William
Organization(s): 
University of New Mexico

I am broadly interested in human ecology, community ecology, metabolic ecology, macroecology and biogeography. I’m currently investigating the following questions:

  • What are the ecological forces behind patterns of human cultural and linguistic diversity and how much do they explain?
  • How does territory size of humans and other social animals scale with population or group size? What does this suggest about the role of information in “social metabolism,” or the energy used by a social system?
  • How can cancer, which shares many analogies with ecosystems, be insightfully considered and modeled as an ecological system?

The Brown Lab and UNM generally are proving wonderful places to pursue such collaborative, interdisciplinary research.

Research Interests: 
human ecology, community ecology, metabolic ecology, macroecology and biogeography
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