Research

My research interests are in population and community ecology, primarily in aquatic ecosystems. How do populations and communities respond to anthropogenic stressors (e.g., climate change, invasive species, and hydrologic alteration) and what ecological hypotheses govern or can help us predict those responses? I'm particularly interested in exploring these questions through the lens of food webs, which unite the fields of population and community ecology with ecosystem ecology. Each node in a food web consists of a population, or in some cases an entire community. Understanding how these species interact with one another, the type of interactions, and how these interactions vary in time and space provides insight into ecological mechanisms (e.g., changes in growth rate as a result of diet switching) that drive ecosystem level patterns (e.g., changes in secondary production or energy fluxes). I do this by using a rigorous quantitative and hypothesis-driven approach.