Research
Responses of populations under harvesting pressure to environmental variability
Harvested populations may experience profound changes to demographic structure as well as change (evolutionary or non-evolutionary) in traits ranging from body size to behavior. I aim to determine how these changes might interact with populations' ecology, their traits and evolutionary history, and their response to environmental changes. I am using individual-based bioenergetic modeling of multiple harvested species to determine when the plastic and evolutionary effects of harvest and exogenous resource changes are expected to result in overall stasis or change for traits like age and size at maturity and size-at-age, as well as the underlying bioenergetic traits setting these life history traits. We are also parameterizing a version of this model for the small, fast-life-history poeciliid fish Heterandria formosa, with which we are conducting a multi-generation harvest selection experiment which will generate results that can be compared to model predictions. I will also be in residence for 10 weeks at the National Museum of Natural History in DC in 2022 through the Smithsonian 10-Week Graduate Fellowship, collecting measurements and samples for isotopic analysis from Chesapeake Bay region specimens of three harvested groundfish species to study trait and trophic level change through time.
Signatures of ecological state flips along spatial gradients
For this research, I have worked with Tim Wootton at the University of Chicago in developing an agent-based model of mussel bed lower boundary formation and comparing model results to theoretical predictions and field data.
Schumm MP. 2019. An Individual-Based Mechanistic Model of Mussel Bed Boundary Formation and Intensity. Computational Modeling in the Social and Ecological Sciences (CoMSES) virtual conference (video presentation and code available here).
Elevational gradients of morphological diversity in birds and latitudinal gradients in ecological diversity in birds and marine bivalves
This undergraduate research was supported by the UChicago Department of Ecology and Evolution, the NSF, and the Chicago Field Museum collections, and resulted in two publications:
*Schumm MP, *Edie SM, Collins KS, Gómez-Bahamón V, Supriya K, White AE, Price TD, Jablonski D. 2019. Common latitudinal gradients in functional richness and functional evenness across marine and terrestrial systems. Proceedings of the Royal Society. 286(1908) (link to PDF).
Schumm MP, White AE, Supriya K, Price TD. 2019. Ecological limits as the driver of bird species richness patterns along the east Himalayan elevational gradient. American Naturalist. Volume 195, Number 5 (link to article).
*equal contributors