Research Projects
GLOBAL WETLAND BIODIVERSITY
Wetlands represent <5% of total land cover, yet they are incredibly important habitats embedded in ecosystems from Temperate Forests to Savanna to Tropical Wet Forests. In each, they serve vital ecosystem functions, but also harbor high biodiversity of taxa ranging from birds to insects to plants. Understanding how biotic and abiotic factors influence these systems globally can help us uncover mechanisms for community assembly, determine priority conservation areas, and explain range shifts/contractions in imperiled species due to wetland loss. I use community science data to examine contributions of wetland systems to biodiversity within different taxonomic groups and in different environmental contexts.
BETA DIVERSITY
Biodiversity scholars have long wrestled with the mechanistic and theoretically underpinnings of beta-diversity, also known as species turnover. Communities may change due to species loss, replacement, nestedness, abundance of common species, and a variety of others. These changes are not constant depending on the scale of study, dispersal ability, niche space, habitat heterogenity, and other stochastic forces. Uncovering how and why species turnover occurs is crucial for conservation planning as well as scientific understanding of biodiversity, especially in our world of unprecedented environmental change. I work to uncover how species turnover in isolated wetland systems occurs both temporally and spatially in birds, in a variety of spatial contexts from continental scale changes, changes between ecoregions, and even intra-daily changes in bird communities at individual wetland sites in urban contexts.
LAND COVER AND THE RURAL-URBAN DIVIDE
With land cover and land-use changes occurring across the globe, we have seen dramatic losses in biodiversity locally. This may be due to habitat fragmentation, habitat loss, land conversion, and many others. I use classic landscape ecology questions to investigate how different taxa respond to these changes both spatially (different scales of impact) and temporally (do declines happen rapidly, or slowly). These questions can help provide land managers and conservation planners with the necessary information to make local scale changes to habitat to promote biodiversity, while still keeping environmental context in mind.