TROPICAL ECOLOGY & CONSERVATION
Our research addresses fundamental questions at the interface of community ecology, macroecology and conservation biology. We study why sites, such as national parks, support different communities of species, how global change is affecting populations and communities and how we can use this understanding for conservation. We investigate these questions by combining observational field data, remotely sensed environmental data, trait and phylogenetic data, and advanced statistical modeling to integrate and synthesize large, complex datasets on climate, plants and warm-blooded animals. Most of this work focuses on tropical forests.
Currently, the majority of our knowledge about tropical communities comes from plants. However, the mechanisms that structure communities of tropical plants, which are sessile, may differ from the mechanisms that structure communities of large-bodied, mobile vertebrates. Our research therefore fills important gaps in vertebrate ecology and its applications to conservation by contributing to our understanding of tropical vertebrate ecology at a time when tropical forests and their inhabitants are disappearing rapidly. In addition to local scale studies, we often work at large spatial scales because macroecological studies can harness information from the local level to uncover big picture patterns in ecology and the extent to which local results are generalizable. Furthermore, macroecological approaches are particularly useful for organisms, such as large wild animals of conservation concern, which cannot be studied experimentally due to ethical reasons. Studying the drivers of biodiversity at large spatial scales can prompt hypothesis generation that can then be tested at more local scales, resulting in an important feedback between local scale and macro scale ecology.
Research themes
Variation in food web structure over space and time: Food webs, which describe the multi-level trophic interactions between consumers and resources, play critical roles in the maintenance of diversity. They can be represented as ecological networks where species are represented by nodes that are connected through their interactions as edges. Decades of research have uncovered some generalities based on individual food web networks. However, most of our understanding of food web networks is derived from single-site studies or microcosm experiments, which inhibits generalizations across scales and hampers predictions of how global change will impact trophic networks and ecosystem functioning. To address this research gap, we are currently investigating variation in mammal food web structure over large spatial scales.
Tropical vertebrate responses to global change: Climate change, habitat loss and illegal hunting are three of the most critical threats to wildlife globally. We study how these aspects of global change affect tropical mammal and bird communities. This research utilizes a unique set of data - the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring Network - which is a large network of tropical sites with standardized data collection on plants, animals and climate. Camera traps capture the presence of mammals and birds at the local scale at which biotic interactions occur. Moreover, the replication of a standardized protocol throughout the tropics provides fine-grained data over a large spatial extent, a rare but essential tool for identifying biodiversity patterns and the underlying processes that generate them.
Determinants of tropical mammal and bird community composition: How ecological communities are assembled is a fundamental question in biology. A principle goal of our research is to identify the processes that shape the taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic composition of biological communities and to evaluate how and why community assembly varies across spatial scales, ecological systems and taxonomic groups.
Tropical vertebrate responses to global change: Climate change, habitat loss and illegal hunting are three of the most critical threats to wildlife globally. We study how these aspects of global change affect tropical mammal and bird communities. This research utilizes a unique set of data - the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring Network - which is a large network of tropical sites with standardized data collection on plants, animals and climate. Camera traps capture the presence of mammals and birds at the local scale at which biotic interactions occur. Moreover, the replication of a standardized protocol throughout the tropics provides fine-grained data over a large spatial extent, a rare but essential tool for identifying biodiversity patterns and the underlying processes that generate them.
Determinants of tropical mammal and bird community composition: How ecological communities are assembled is a fundamental question in biology. A principle goal of our research is to identify the processes that shape the taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic composition of biological communities and to evaluate how and why community assembly varies across spatial scales, ecological systems and taxonomic groups.
Illustrations by John Megahan