Julia Monk

Large mammal populations across the globe are in decline due to habitat fragmentation and other human activities. At the same time, we are only beginning to understand the impacts these megafauna have on other animals, plant communities, and biogeochemical cycles. My research explores how animals - particularly through interactions between mammalian predators, herbivores, plants, and soils - influence the ecosystems they inhabit. I combine biogeochemistry, wildlife biology, and geospatial methods to understand the relationship between the processes that sustain ecosystems and the living organisms that both shape and depend on those processes. I also collaborate with historians of science, science & technology studies scholars, and gender & sexuality studies researchers to explore the evolutionary underpinnings of same-sex sexual behavior in animals and to understand how contemporary attitudes towards sex and gender have shaped scientific conceptualizations of animal sexuality and biological sex. Ongoing research themes include:

Animals also play an important role in biogeochemical cycling by consuming primary productivity and processing, transporting, and depositing carbon and nutrients across landscapes. Predators in particular can be important drivers of these ecosystem processes, as they influence the density, movement, and diet of herbivorous prey. The role of mammals in cycling and transporting nutrients may be particularly important in arid ecosystems, where primary productivity is low and resources are scarce and spatially clustered. In these landscapes with high heterogeneity of resources and risk, large herbivores can transport and hasten the cycling of limiting nutrients, while both direct predation and predation risk can determine the spatial patterning of herbivore-mediated nutrient cycling. My research seeks to understand the biogeochemical legacy of predator-prey interactions by investigating the impacts of both consumptive and non-consumptive predator effects on the movement and distribution of nutrients in heterogeneous landscapes. Current work on the non-consumptive effects of pumas on guanaco herbivory and belowground ecosystem processes is ongoing at multiple sites in Argentine Patagonia, funded by the National Geographic Society.

My research centers upon the interconnectedness of wildlife communities and the ecosystems they inhabit; I am thus naturally led to consider the implications of such ecological connectivity in the face of global environmental change. I am interested in understanding how changes in animal populations and food webs (such as those driven by disease, human land use, or climate change) impact vital ecosystem processes such as nutrient cycling or carbon sequestration, and how, given such ecological connectivity, communities can balance multiple environmental and societal priorities. For example, there is growing enthusiasm around the restoration of diminished or recently extirpated wildlife populations to both address the biodiversity crisis and act as a natural climate solution. However, animal impacts on ecosystem processes, including carbon sequestration, can be highly context-dependent. Current work focuses on understanding how wild and domestic ungulates influence plant diversity, above-and belowground productivity, nutrient availability, and carbon storage in long- and short-term pools under different land use histories and management contexts, in Argentine Patagonia and other regions.

I believe that fighting for equity and justice both within and outside of academic science is a moral imperative; however, I also consider this pursuit an intellectual responsibility. Bias is an inherent source of error in the scientific process, and indeed in any endeavor conducted by human beings. Correction for this error lies not in ignoring it, but in expanding as far as possible the scope of perspectives and voices that contribute to science, and continually questioning how the question formulation, data collection, analysis, and interpretation of our work may be shaped or influenced by our lived experience and position within societal structures of power. It also requires reflection on the ways scientific methods and disciplines have historically enacted harms and been wielded as tools of colonialism and white supremacy. In this work, I aim to learn from colleagues and collaborators in the humanities, particularly history of science and science & technology studies scholars, who have long conducted research on these issues and have a keen understanding of the limitations of scientific ways of knowing. My colleagues and I proposed a new hypothesis for the evolution of same-sex sexual behavior in animals: that same-sex behavior was part of the ancestral condition for sexually reproducing anisogamous animals, and that its evolutionary costs are much lower than previously believed. We also contend that previous work on the evolution same-sex sexual behavior has been predicated upon some unchecked assumptions that likely extend from the limited lenses that have long characterized academic science, and are excited to see the work that continues to grow from queer, feminist approaches to these topics, including ongoing critiques of basic and operational definitions of biological sex.