Kyle E. Harms

Area of Interest

I am curious about natural diversity, ranging from the ecological and evolutionary processes that generate and maintain a wide variety of phenotypes and life-histories, to the causes of temporal and spatial patterns in organismal distribution, relative abundance, and species richness. Members of my research group strive for mechanistic understanding of species' strategies and interactions, per se, and to provide explanations for the structure and dynamics of populations and communities, primarily within tropical and sub-tropical latitudes.

Selected Publications

*Asterisks identify current and former graduate students and post-docs from our research group at LSU.

• *Luis Y. Santiago-Rosario, Kyle E. Harms & Sarah Mathews. 2026. Stoichiometric mismatches between Australian showy mistletoes and their hosts: You are what you assimilate. Ecosphere 17:e70717.
• *Maggie C. Vincent, Kyle E. Harms, Hossein Asgari & Patricia L. R. Brennan. 2026. Sweet somethings? The extent and proposed functions of vocalizations during and after copulation in vertebrates. Behavioral Ecology & Sociobiology 80:90.
• *Carrie A. Barker & Kyle E. Harms. 2025. Contrasting species richness in patches of alternative foundation species suggests a framework for understanding Species of Unusual Effect. Journal of Vegetation Science 36:e70070.
• Kyle E. Harms, David M. Watson, *Luis Y. Santiago-Rosario & Sarah Mathews. 2023. Exposing the error hidden in plain sight: a critique of Calder's (1983) group selectionist seed-dispersal hypothesis for mistletoe "mimicry" of host plants. Ecology & Evolution 13:e10760.
• *Luis Y. Santiago-Rosario, Ana L. Salgado, Diego Paredes-Burneo & Kyle E. Harms. 2023. Low sodium availability in hydroponically manipulated host plants promotes cannibalism in a lepidopteran herbivore. Scientific Reports 13:20822.
• Kyle E. Harms. 2022. Bison outperform cattle at restoring their home on the range. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119:e2213632119.
• *Luis Y. Santiago-Rosario, Kyle E. Harms, Bret D. Elderd, Pamela B. Hart & Maheshi Dassanayake. 2021. No escape: The influence of substrate sodium on plant growth and tissue sodium responses. Ecology & Evolution 11:14231-14249.
• Kyle E. Harms, James W. Dalling & María N. Sánchez de Stapf. 2020. Trade-offs tip toward litter trapping: Insights from a little-known Panamanian cloud-forest treelet. Plants, People, Planet 2:582-586. [Featured article in Flora Obscura series]
• *Katherine A. Hovanes, Kyle E. Harms, *Paul R. Gagnon, *Jonathan A. Myers & Bret D. Elderd. 2018. Overdispersed spatial patterning of dominant bunchgrasses in southeastern pine savannas. The American Naturalist 191:658-667.
• *Adriana Bravo & Kyle E. Harms. 2017. The biogeography of sodium in Neotropical figs (Moraceae). Biotropica 49:18-22.
• Kyle E. Harms, *Paul R. Gagnon, *Heather A. Passmore, *Jonathan A. Myers & William J. Platt. 2017. Groundcover community assembly in high-diversity pine savannas: Seed arrival and fire-generated environmental filtering. Ecosphere 8(3):e01716.10.1002/ecs2.1716.
• *Sandra P. Galeano & Kyle E. Harms. 2016. Coloration in the polymorphic frog Oophaga pumilio associates with level of aggressiveness in intraspecific and interspecific behavioral interactions. Behavioral Ecology & Sociobiology 70:83-97.
• *Metha M. Klock, Luke G. Barrett, Peter H. Thrall & Kyle E. Harms. 2015. Host promiscuity in symbiont associations can influence exotic legume establishment and colonization of novel ranges. Diversity & Distributions 21:1193-1203.
• Peter T. Green, Kyle E. Harms & Joseph H. Connell. 2014. Nonrandom, diversifying processes are disproportionately strong in the smallest size classes of a tropical forest. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111:18649-18654.
• *Adriana Bravo, Kyle E. Harms & Louise H. Emmons. 2012. Keystone resource (Ficus) chemistry explains lick visitation by frugivorous bats. Journal of Mammalogy 93:1099-1109.
• *Paul R. Gagnon, *Heather A. Passmore, William J. Platt, *Jonathan A. Myers, *C. E. Timothy Paine & Kyle E. Harms. 2010. Does pyrogenicity protect burning plants? Ecology 91:3481-3486. [Cover article for this issue of Ecology]
• *Jonathan A. Myers & Kyle E. Harms. 2009. Local immigration, competition from dominant guilds, and the ecological assembly of high-diversity pine savannas. Ecology 90:2745-2754.
• *C. E. Timothy Paine, Kyle E. Harms, Stefan A. Schnitzer & Walter P. Carson. 2008. Weak competition among tropical tree seedlings: implications for species coexistence. Biotropica 40:432-440. [Received the 2009 Award for Excellence in Tropical Biology & Conservation from the Biotropica Editorial Board]
• *Jane E. Carlson & Kyle E. Harms. 2007. The benefits of bathing buds: water calyces protect flowers from a microlepidopteran herbivore. Biology Letters 3:405-407.
• Robert John, James W. Dalling, Kyle E. Harms, Joseph B. Yavitt, Robert F. Stallard, Matthew Mirabello, Stephen P. Hubbell, Renato Valencia, Hugo Navarrete, Martha Vallejo & Robin B. Foster. 2007. Soil nutrients influence spatial distributions of tropical tree species. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104:864-869.
• Christopher Wills, Kyle E. Harms, Richard Condit, David King, Jill Thompson, Fangliang He, Helene C. Muller-Landau, Peter Ashton, Elizabeth Losos, Liza Comita, Stephen Hubbell, James LaFrankie, Sarayudh Bunyavejchewin, H. S. Dattaraja, Stuart Davies, Shameema Esufali, Robin Foster, Nimal Gunatilleke, Savitri Gunatilleke, Pamela Hall, Akira Itoh, Robert John, Somboon Kiratiprayoon, Suzanne Loo de Lao, Marie Massa, Cheryl Nath, Md. Nur Supardi Noor, Abdul Rahman Kassim, Raman Sukumar, Hebbalalu Satyanarayana Suresh, I-Fang Sun, Sylvester Tan, Takuo Yamakura & Jess Zimmerman. 2006. Non-random processes maintain diversity in tropical forests. Science 311:527-531.
• Kyle E. Harms, Jennifer S. Powers & Rebecca A. Montgomery. 2004. Variation in small sapling density, understory cover and resource availability in four Neotropical forests. Biotropica 36:40-51.
• Kyle E. Harms, Richard Condit, Stephen P. Hubbell & Robin B. Foster. 2001. Habitat associations of trees and shrubs in a 50-ha neotropical forest plot. Journal of Ecology 89:947-959.
• Kyle E. Harms, S. Joseph Wright, Osvaldo Calderón, Andrés Hernández & Edward Allen Herre. 2000. Pervasive density-dependent recruitment enhances seedling diversity in a tropical forest. Nature 404:493-495.