Brian McGill

Brian McGill
Occupation	Ecologist
Alma mater	Harvard University University of Arizona

Brian McGill is an American ecologist and Professor in the School of Biology and Ecology and the Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions at the University of Maine. His research addresses biodiversity change, macroecology, and species distributions.

Education

McGill received a BA in Mathematics from Harvard University in 1988. He earned a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Arizona in 2003.

Career

McGill has been a Professor at the University of Maine since 2010, holding a joint appointment in the School of Biology and Ecology and the Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions.

Research

According to Semantic Scholar, McGill's publication record includes 11 papers with a combined total of 283 citations and an h-index of 7. His work has appeared in journals including Science, Nature, Science Advances, and Nature Communications, addressing topics such as biodiversity change over time, shifts in body size within animal populations, and biotic homogenization and differentiation.

McGill has received funding from the National Science Foundation for three awards totaling $4,185,329. These include an RII Track-2 FEC award, "Harnessing Spatiotemporal Data Science to Predict Responses of Biodiversity and Rural Communities under Climate Change," awarded to the University of Maine on August 19, 2020, for $3,995,366. He also received a Collaborative Research ABI Development award, "Creating a generic workflow for scaling up the production of species ranges," awarded to the University of Maine on June 27, 2016, for $89,963. Earlier, he received a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Informatics for FY 2003, awarded on June 28, 2003, for $100,000.

Selected publications

• "Looking back on biodiversity change: lessons for the road ahead" (2023), Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Biological Sciences
• "Synthesis reveals approximately balanced biotic differentiation and homogenization" (2024), Science Advances
• "Regional occupancy increases for widespread species but decreases for narrowly distributed species in metacommunity time series" (2023), Nature Communications
• "Widespread shifts in body size within populations and assemblages" (2023), Science
• "Reply to: Shifting baselines and biodiversity success stories" (2022), Nature
• "Better incentives are needed to reward academic software development" (2023), Nature Ecology & Evolution
• "Overlooked local biodiversity loss--response" (2014), Science
• "BIEN: A biodiversity informatics ecosystem advancing open and reproducible workflows for plant observation, plot and trait data" (2026), Methods in Ecology and Evolution
• "Local changes dominate variation in biotic homogenization and differentiation" (2023), bioRxiv
• "Disentangling non-random structure from random placement when estimating β-diversity through space or time" (2023), bioRxiv

External links

• Brian McGill's ORCID profile