About amanda

Dr. Amanda Koltz is a scientist who studies community ecology and climate change. She is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where she runs a lab and teaches classes. Amanda grew up in a small dairy town in upstate New York, about 5 hours north of New York City. When she was a kid, her dad made sure that she and her brothers were “outdoor kids” by never letting them play inside, unless it was raining. They complained about it at the time, but it gave Amanda a love of nature and the environment. She didn’t realize that that could lead to a career in science, and for a long time thought that if you loved science you had to become a doctor or a veterinarian. She discovered that she could make a career of being outside and asking questions about nature when she spent a week at a marine biology summer camp in high school, and that’s why she decided to study biology in college. When she's not working, Amanda enjoys spending time outside with her family.

What does Amanda study?

Amanda studies what is called “biodiversity and ecosystem functioning”. This means she looks at how having more or fewer species in an ecosystem can affect how different parts of the ecosystem work together, or how the ecosystem on the whole functions. Some examples of “ecosystem functions” are how water or nutrients move around an ecosystem. For her PhD, Amanda chose to do a project that looked at how climate change can alter ecosystem function, in addition to biodiversity. She decided to go to the Arctic to study this, since this is an area that is warming rapidly and whose species are being severely impacted by climate change. Since her PhD, she's continued to study the ways in which a warming climate can affect ecosystem balance in the arctic, including how wolf spiders are parasitized by small wasps! Now, she runs a lab where her students study everything from dung beetles to parasites in white-footed deer mice. Amanda still spends several weeks at a time in remote areas of the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic.

During her PhD, Amanda spent her summers in the Alaskan arctic at Toolik Field Station (and Ms. Contreras was her research assistant for 2 of those summers!). Toolik is 500 miles north of the artic circle and a 12 hour drive from Fairbanks, Alaska's northern most major city. During the summer, the sun never sets and it's not uncommon for a herd of caribou to wander through camp or to spot wolves running by from the dining hall.

Amanda wanted to know how a warming climate could affect predator-prey interactions, so she chose the arctic since it's warming faster than most places on the planet. And, while most people may think of wolves or grizzly bears when they think of arctic predators, Amanda chose to study something far smaller--wolf spiders! Arthropod, or bug, food webs, are much easier to study than mammals because you can study a whole ecosystem in a relatively small area. 

Amanda's research was written about by Washington University in St. Louis, where she went to work after she completed her PhD. Read the article here.