About

Anthony Di Fiore is a professor in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on population genetics, comparative socioecology, mating systems, molecular ecology, phylogenetics, tropical ecology, and computational modeling. He specializes in the study of South and Central American primates, contributing to our understanding of their ecological and evolutionary dynamics.

Research topics

• Biology
• Ecology
• Geography
• Zoology
• Demography
• Agroforestry
• Combinatorics
• Atmospheric sciences
• Geology
• Environmental science
• Genetics
• Immunology
• Climatology
• Mathematics
• Statistics

Selected publications

• Phylogeography and Niche Modeling of Night Monkeys (Aotus) in Northwestern South America

  International Journal of Primatology · 2026-01-29

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  PublisherDOI

• Sex-Biased Dispersal, Reproductive Structure, and Relatedness in the White-Footed Tamarin (Oedipomidas leucopus)

  International Journal of Primatology · 2025-07-10

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  PublisherDOI

• Variation in Maternal Effort, Activity Budgets, and Feeding Behavior in Wild Saddleback Tamarins (<i>Leontocebus weddelli</i>) in Northwestern Bolivia

  American Journal of Primatology · 2025-05-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Among primates, maternal infant care may vary in response to several factors including litter size, reproductive history, and health status. In cooperative breeders, maternal investment may also depend on the amount of help their group mates (or allomothers) provide. We studied infant care and activity in four wild groups of saddleback tamarins (Leontocebus weddelli) and collected hair and fecal samples from which we extracted genomic DNA to estimate kin relationships among group members. We use these data to examine how maternal care was affected by seven factors: a) number of adults; b) number of adult males; c) presence of genetically identified sire; d) number of non-parental close relatives; e) number of infants; f) maternal body mass; and g) maternal parity. Furthermore, to investigate how mothers coped with the costs of reproduction, we compared mothers to other adults in their feeding and resting rates during the 15-weeks pre- and post-partum. Overall, we found that mothers contributed on average 16% of infant transport and 30% of infant food transfers per group-week. We found no significant effects of any of the variables we examined on the proportion of time mothers transported infants or provisioned food. However, mothers rested less than other group members during both the pre- and post-partum periods. Our results demonstrate that all mothers engage in low levels of infant care relative to species without cooperative breeding; however, we failed to find a clear explanation for variation in maternal care among individuals.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Evolution of Primate Social Systems and Social Complexity: The Promise and Challenge of Comparative Phylogenetic Methods

  Annual Review of Anthropology · 2025-10-21 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Social systems vary across the primate order, both within and between major lineages. Understanding how and why this variation arises and how social systems have changed over the radiation is a major focus of comparative primate evolutionary biology. For anthropologists in particular, the issue of social evolution resonates strongly because of interest in how certain aspects of human social systems—e.g., multilevel societies, divisions of labor—have come about. For primatologists, interest centers more around understanding the evolution of particular kinds of sociality (e.g., solitary versus various forms of group living); the variation observed in mating, breeding, and care systems; and the adaptive value of relationships. Attention has also been paid to the evolution of social “complexity,” although that concept is ill-defined and complicated by our human-centered perspective on the natural world. Here, I review 50 years of research on primate social evolution and how comparative phylogenetic approaches have informed that work, while offering some cautions and suggestions for the future.

  PublisherDOI

• Tropical forests in the Americas are changing too slowly to track climate change

  Science · 2025-03-06 · 39 citations

  articleOpen access

  Understanding the capacity of forests to adapt to climate change is of pivotal importance for conservation science, yet this is still widely unknown. This knowledge gap is particularly acute in high-biodiversity tropical forests. Here, we examined how tropical forests of the Americas have shifted community trait composition in recent decades as a response to changes in climate. Based on historical trait-climate relationships, we found that, overall, the studied functional traits show shifts of less than 8% of what would be expected given the observed changes in climate. However, the recruit assemblage shows shifts of 21% relative to climate change expectation. The most diverse forests on Earth are changing in functional trait composition but at a rate that is fundamentally insufficient to track climate change.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Influence of Fruit Availability on the Diet and Grouping Patterns of Spider Monkeys (Ateles spp.) in a Relatively Undisturbed and a Degraded Forest in Tropical South America

  International Journal of Primatology · 2025-03-22

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  PublisherDOI

• Use and misuse of trait imputation in ecology: the problem of using out‐of‐context imputed values

  Ecography · 2025-02-03 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  Despite the progress in the measurement and accessibility of plant trait information, acquiring sufficiently complete data from enough species to answer broad‐scale questions in plant functional ecology and biogeography remains challenging. A common way to overcome this challenge is by imputation, or ‘gap‐filling' of trait values. This has proven appropriate when focusing on the overall patterns emerging from the database being imputed. However, some applications force the imputation procedure out of its original scope, using imputed values independently from the imputation context, and specific trait values for a given species are used as input for computing new variables. We tested the performance of three widely used imputation methods (Bayesian hierarchical probabilistic matrix factorization, multiple imputation by chained equations with predictive mean matching, and Rphylopars) on a database of tropical tree and shrub traits. By applying a leave‐one‐out procedure, we assessed the accuracy and precision of the imputed values and found that out‐of‐context use of imputed values may bias the estimation of different variables. We also found that low redundancy (i.e. low predictability of a new value on the basis of existing values) in the dataset, not uncommon for empirical datasets, is likely the main cause of low accuracy and precision in the imputed values. We therefore suggest the use of a leave‐one‐out procedure to test the quality of the imputed values before any out‐of‐context application of the imputed values, and make practical recommendations to avoid the misuse of imputation procedures. Furthermore, we recommend not publishing gap‐filled datasets, publishing instead only the empirical data, together with the imputation method applied and the corresponding script to reproduce the imputation. This will help avoid the spread of imputed data, whose accuracy, precision, and source are difficult to assess and track, into the public domain.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Large range sizes link fast life histories with high species richness across wet tropical tree floras

  Scientific Reports · 2025-02-07 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Understanding how the traits of lineages are related to diversification is key for elucidating the origin of variation in species richness. Here, we test whether traits are related to species richness among lineages of trees from all major biogeographical settings of the lowland wet tropics. We explore whether variation in mortality rate, breeding system and maximum diameter are related to species richness, either directly or via associations with range size, among 463 genera that contain wet tropical forest trees. For Amazonian genera, we also explore whether traits are related to species richness via variation among genera in mean species-level range size. Lineages with higher mortality rates-faster life-history strategies-have larger ranges in all biogeographic settings and have higher mean species-level range sizes in Amazonia. These lineages also have smaller maximum diameters and, in the Americas, contain dioecious species. In turn, lineages with greater overall range size have higher species richness. Our results show that fast life-history strategies influence species richness in all biogeographic settings because lineages with these ecological strategies have greater range sizes. These links suggest that dispersal has been a key process in the evolution of the tropical forest flora.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The pace of life for forest trees

  Science · 2024-10-03 · 29 citations

  articleOpen access

  Tree growth and longevity trade-offs fundamentally shape the terrestrial carbon balance. Yet, we lack a unified understanding of how such trade-offs vary across the world's forests. By mapping life history traits for a wide range of species across the Americas, we reveal considerable variation in life expectancies from 10 centimeters in diameter (ranging from 1.3 to 3195 years) and show that the pace of life for trees can be accurately classified into four demographic functional types. We found emergent patterns in the strength of trade-offs between growth and longevity across a temperature gradient. Furthermore, we show that the diversity of life history traits varies predictably across forest biomes, giving rise to a positive relationship between trait diversity and productivity. Our pan-latitudinal assessment provides new insights into the demographic mechanisms that govern the carbon turnover rate across forest biomes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Consistent patterns of common species across tropical tree communities

  Nature · 2024-01-10 · 55 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Trees structure the Earth’s most biodiverse ecosystem, tropical forests. The vast number of tree species presents a formidable challenge to understanding these forests, including their response to environmental change, as very little is known about most tropical tree species. A focus on the common species may circumvent this challenge. Here we investigate abundance patterns of common tree species using inventory data on 1,003,805 trees with trunk diameters of at least 10 cm across 1,568 locations 1–6 in closed-canopy, structurally intact old-growth tropical forests in Africa, Amazonia and Southeast Asia. We estimate that 2.2%, 2.2% and 2.3% of species comprise 50% of the tropical trees in these regions, respectively. Extrapolating across all closed-canopy tropical forests, we estimate that just 1,053 species comprise half of Earth’s 800 billion tropical trees with trunk diameters of at least 10 cm. Despite differing biogeographic, climatic and anthropogenic histories 7 , we find notably consistent patterns of common species and species abundance distributions across the continents. This suggests that fundamental mechanisms of tree community assembly may apply to all tropical forests. Resampling analyses show that the most common species are likely to belong to a manageable list of known species, enabling targeted efforts to understand their ecology. Although they do not detract from the importance of rare species, our results open new opportunities to understand the world’s most diverse forests, including modelling their response to environmental change, by focusing on the common species that constitute the majority of their trees.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Doctoral Dissertation Research: Mating strategies and reproductive endocrinology of female primates

  NSF · $24k · 2017–2019

• Evaluating the Presence of Zika Virus in Neotropical Primates

  NIH · $430k · 2017–2021

• Doctoral Dissertation Research: Grouping dynamics of lowland woolly monkeys

  NSF · $14k · 2015–2017

• Doctoral Dissertation Research: Species boundaries, phylogeography, and primate conservation genetics

  NSF · $22k · 2017–2018

• Male Cooperation in Primates: Physiological Correlates of Intra- and Intergroup Relations

  NSF · $501k · 2016–2023

Frequent coauthors

• Julien Engel

  UMR Botanique et Modélisation de l’Architecture des Plantes et des végétations

  115 shared

• Jérôme Chave

  Institut de Recherche pour le Développement

  106 shared

• Luzmila Arroyo

  Gabriel René Moreno Autonomous University

  96 shared

• John Terborgh

  University of Florida

  90 shared

• Nigel C. A. Pitman

  Field Museum of Natural History

  88 shared

• Hans ter Steege

  Naturalis Biodiversity Center

  86 shared

• David Neill

  Universidad Estatal Amazónica

  85 shared

• Jean‐François Molino

  Université de Montpellier

  84 shared