Dr Andrew Letten
Research Fellow, ARC
ARC DECRA Senior Research Fellow
School of the Environment
+61 7 336 52454
Researcher biography
Andrew is a population biologist in the School of Biological Sciences. A broad goal of his research is to understand the effect of environmental variability on the stability of ecological communities. At the same time, in order to deliver on this broader goal, he is working to scale up understanding from simple tractable systems to the more complex dynamics of real world-systems.
Before joining UQ, he was a Marie Curie fellow working with Jonathan Levine and Alex Hall at ETH Zurich (2018-2020), a postdoctoral fellow in Daniel Stouffer's lab at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand (2017-2018), and a CEHG (Centre for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics) postdoctoral fellow in Tad Fukami's lab at Stanford University, USA (2015-2017). He did his PhD (2011-2015) with David Keith in the Centre for Ecosystem Science at UNSW Australia.
Publications
Journal Articles
Letten, Andrew D., Yamamichi, Masato, Richardson, James A. and Ke, Po‐Ju (2024). Microbial Dormancy Supports Multi‐Species Coexistence Under Resource Fluctuations. Ecology Letters, 27 (9) e14507. doi: 10.1111/ele.14507
Delaney, Oscar, Letten, Andrew D and Engelstadter, Jan (2023). Frequent, infinitesimal bottlenecks maximize the rate of microbial adaptation. Genetics, 225 (4) iyad185. doi: 10.1093/genetics/iyad185
Yamamichi, Masato, Letten, Andrew D. and Schreiber, Sebastian J. (2023). Eco‐evolutionary maintenance of diversity in fluctuating environments. Ecology Letters, 26 (S1), S152-S167. doi: 10.1111/ele.14286
Spaak, Jurg W., Millet, Remi, Ke, Po-Ju, Letten, Andrew D. and De Laender, Frederik (2023). The effect of non-linear competitive interactions on quantifying niche and fitness differences. Theoretical Ecology, 16 (2), 161-170. doi: 10.1007/s12080-023-00560-6
Spaak, Jurg W., Ke, Po‐Ju, Letten, Andrew D. and De Laender, Frederik (2023). Different measures of niche and fitness differences tell different tales. Oikos, 2023 (4) e09573. doi: 10.1111/oik.09573
Letten, Andrew D. and Ludington, William B. (2023). Pulsed, continuous or somewhere in between? Resource dynamics matter in the optimisation of microbial communities. The ISME Journal, 17 (4), 641-644. doi: 10.1038/s41396-023-01369-1
Yamamichi, Masato and Letten, Andrew D. (2022). Extending the gleaner‐opportunist trade‐off. Journal of Animal Ecology, 91 (11), 2163-2170. doi: 10.1111/1365-2656.13813
Letten, Andrew D. (2021). Coexistence holes fill a gap in community assembly theory. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 5 (8), 1062-1063. doi: 10.1038/s41559-021-01461-9
Yamamichi, Masato and Letten, Andrew D. (2021). Rapid evolution promotes fluctuation‐dependent species coexistence. Ecology Letters, 24 (4), 812-818. doi: 10.1111/ele.13707
Letten, Andrew D., Baumgartner, Michael, Pfrunder-Cardozo, Katia R., Levine, Jonathan M. and Hall, Alex R. (2021). Human-associated microbiota suppress invading bacteria even under disruption by antibiotics. The ISME Journal, 15 (9), 2809-2812. doi: 10.1038/s41396-021-00929-7
Letten, Andrew D., Hall, Alex R. and Levine, Jonathan M. (2021). Using ecological coexistence theory to understand antibiotic resistance and microbial competition. Nature Ecology and Evolution, 5 (4), 431-441. doi: 10.1038/s41559-020-01385-w
Letten, Andrew D. and Yamamichi, Masato (2021). Gleaning, fast and slow: In defense of a canonical ecological trade-off. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118 (5) e2022754118, 1-2. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2022754118
Hendershot, J. Nicholas, Smith, Jeffrey R., Anderson, Christopher B., Letten, Andrew D., Frishkoff, Luke O., Zook, Jim R., Fukami, Tadashi and Daily, Gretchen C. (2020). Publisher Correction: Intensive farming drives long-term shifts in avian community composition. Nature, 581 (7808), E6-E6. doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2310-0
Hendershot, J. Nicholas, Smith, Jeffrey R., Anderson, Christopher B., Letten, Andrew D., Frishkoff, Luke O., Zook, Jim R., Fukami, Tadashi and Daily, Gretchen C. (2020). Intensive farming drives long-term shifts in avian community composition. Nature, 579 (7799), 393-396. doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2090-6
Smith, Jeffrey R., Letten, Andrew D., Ke, Po-Ju, Anderson, Christopher B., Hendershot, J. Nicholas, Dhami, Manpreet K., Dlott, Glade A., Grainger, Tess N., Howard, Meghan E., Morrison, Beth M. L., Routh, Devin, Juan, Priscilla A. San, Mooney, Harold A., Mordecai, Erin A., Crowther, Thomas W. and Daily, Gretchen C. (2019). Author Correction: A global test of ecoregions. Nature Ecology and Evolution, 3 (4), 708-708. doi: 10.1038/s41559-019-0858-6
Letten, Andrew D. and Stouffer, Daniel B. (2019). The mechanistic basis for higher-order interactions and non-additivity in competitive communities. Ecology Letters, 22 (3), 423-436. doi: 10.1111/ele.13211
Grainger, Tess Nahanni, Letten, Andrew D., Gilbert, Benjamin and Fukami, Tadashi (2019). Applying modern coexistence theory to priority effects. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116 (13), 6205-6210. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1803122116
Smith, Jeffrey R., Letten, Andrew D., Ke, Po-Ju, Anderson, Christopher B., Hendershot, J. Nicholas, Dhami, Manpreet K., Dlott, Glade A., Grainger, Tess N., Howard, Meghan E., Morrison, Beth M. L., Routh, Devin, San Juan, Priscilla A., Mooney, Harold A., Mordecai, Erin A., Crowther, Thomas W. and Daily, Gretchen C. (2018). A global test of ecoregions. Nature Ecology and Evolution, 2 (12), 1889-1896. doi: 10.1038/s41559-018-0709-x
Ke, Po-Ju and Letten, Andrew D. (2018). Coexistence theory and the frequency-dependence of priority effects. Nature Ecology and Evolution, 2 (11), 1691-1695. doi: 10.1038/s41559-018-0679-z
Letten, Andrew D., Dhami, Manpreet K., Ke, Po-Ju and Fukami, Tadashi (2018). Species coexistence through simultaneous fluctuation-dependent mechanisms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115 (26), 6745-6750. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1801846115
Dhami, Manpreet K., Hartwig, Thomas, Letten, Andrew D., Banf, Michael and Fukami, Tadashi (2018). Genomic diversity of a nectar yeast clusters into metabolically, but not geographically, distinct lineages. Molecular Ecology, 27 (8), 2067-2076. doi: 10.1111/mec.14535
Thomson, Fiona J., Letten, Andrew D., Tamme, Riin, Edwards, Will and Moles, Angela T. (2018). Can dispersal investment explain why tall plant species achieve longer dispersal distances than short plant species?. New Phytologist, 217 (1), 407-415. doi: 10.1111/nph.14735
Letten, Andrew D., Ke, Po-Ju and Fukami, Tadashi (2017). Linking modern coexistence theory and contemporary niche theory. Ecological Monographs, 87 (2), 161-177. doi: 10.1002/ecm.1242
Mason, T. J., Keith, D. A. and Letten, A. D. (2017). Detecting state changes for ecosystem conservation with long-term monitoring of species composition. Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America, 27 (2), 458-468. doi: 10.1002/eap.1449
Venn, S. E., Pickering, C. M., Butler, S. A. and Letten, A. D. (2016). Using a model based fourth-corner analysis to explain vegetation change following an extraordinary fire disturbance. Oecologia, 182 (3), 855-863. doi: 10.1007/s00442-016-3700-8
Letten, Andrew D., Keith, David A., Tozer, Mark G. and Hui, Francis K.C. (2015). Fine-scale hydrological niche differentiation through the lens of multi-species co-occurrence models. Journal of Ecology, 103 (5), 1264-1275. doi: 10.1111/1365-2745.12428
Letten, Andrew D. and Cornwell, William K. (2015). Trees, branches and (square) roots: Why evolutionary relatedness is not linearly related to functional distance. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 6 (4), 439-444. doi: 10.1111/2041-210X.12237
Flores-Moreno, Habacuc, García-Treviño, Edgar S., Letten, Andrew D. and Moles, Angela T. (2015). In the beginning: phenotypic change in three invasive species through their first two centuries since introduction. Biological Invasions, 17 (4), 1215-1225. doi: 10.1007/s10530-014-0789-8
Clarke, Peter J., Keith, David A., Vincent, Ben E. and Letten, Andrew D. (2015). Post-grazing and post-fire vegetation dynamics: long-term changes in mountain bogs reveal community resilience. Journal of Vegetation Science, 26 (2), 278-290. doi: 10.1111/jvs.12239
Letten, Andrew D., Keith, David A. and Tozer, Mark G. (2014). Phylogenetic and functional dissimilarity does not increase during temporal heathland succession. Royal Society of London. Proceedings B. Biological Sciences, 281 (1797) 20142102, 20142102-10. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2014.2102
Letten, Andrew D., Ashcroft, Michael B., Keith, David A., Gollan, John R. and Ramp, Daniel (2013). The importance of temporal climate variability for spatial patterns in plant diversity. Ecography, 36 (12), 1341-1349. doi: 10.1111/j.1600-0587.2013.00346.x
Letten, Andrew D., Kathleen Lyons, S. and Moles, Angela T. (2013). The mid-domain effect: it's not just about space. Journal of Biogeography, 40 (11), 2017-2019. doi: 10.1111/jbi.12196
Letten, Andrew D. and Midgley, Jeremy J. (2009). Rodent pollination in the Cape legume Liparia parva. Austral Ecology, 34 (2), 233-236. doi: 10.1111/j.1442-9993.2008.01925.x