Oswald Schmitz is the Oastler Professor of Population and Community Ecology, in the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He studies the linkage between two important components of natural systems: biodiversity and ecosystem services, using field experimentation guided by formal mathematical theory of trait-based species interactions.

Robert D. Holt is Arthur R. Marshall, Jr Chair in Ecology and Eminent Scholar, in the Department of Biology at the University of Florida. He is an evolutionary and community ecologist whose contributions are principally theoretical, but always tied to concrete processes in the natural world. He has received the International Ecology Institute Prize in Terrestrial Ecology and the Sewall Wright Award from the American Society of Naturalists.