Research areas

Scaling dynamics from individuals to biomes: Complexity in Arctic change

The Arctic is warming faster than any other global region, impacting - either directly or indirectly - near all terrestrial tundra plant and animal communities. At broad scales, clear patterns of tundra greening and sea ice loss reflect the magnitude of Arctic climate change, but at the local or landscape scale, plant and animal responses are heterogeneous. Scale differences, in how we measure and/or interpret patterns, can lead to a variety of seemingly contradictory findings about shared ecological processes. Recently I’ve co-lead and/or participated in highly interdisciplinary and collaborative projects that explore these perspectives and identify pathways for scientific investigations addressing the causes, consequences, and implications of the rapidly changing Arctic.

Climate change, phenology and life history strategies in seasonal environments

Seasonality introduces temporal variation to the costs and benefits of how and when to best invest limited resources into growth, maintenance, and reproduction to optimize fitness. Organisms have evolved a variety of strategies to to overcome temporal fluctuations in resource availability, but climate change impacts on resource phenology are adding temporal and spatial variability to these resource pools that can lead to novel challenges outside the evolutionary history of an organism. I am interested in the evolution of life history strategies of in seasonal environments, and how changes to resource variability impact mutalistic, competitive, and/or trophic interactions and their demographic consequences. High temporal frequency phenology data can be difficult to come by, but recent advances in time-lapse imagery processing are opening new avenues in the study of individual, community, and landscape level phenological dynamics that represent critical resource pools or life history stages for organisms living in seasonal environments. In the past I’ve explored these dynamics in Arctic systems using observational datasets, but am currently broadening the scope of this research to also include data from new imaging sources and to span Alpine and Desert ecosystems.

Drone and long-term timelapse imagery applications in ecology and conservation

New perspectives inject fresh insights into classic ideas - and newly available data from drone and static sensors are proving just that. The parallel technological revolutions in remote image/data capture and in computational methods that ‘release’ data from a variety of sources are poised to redefine how we approach questions in ecology and conservation, not just by creating new fields of study, but by becoming part of the core toolkit for ALL ecological and conservation field-based empirical work. My own research focus seeks to interface these technological and computational advances with relevant ecological and conservation applications. Specifically, I use multi-spectral, multi-annual, and structural imaging to explore ecological and conservation applications across numerous geographic and disciplinary bounds. Many of these applications are novel, so I work closely with collaborators to develop best practices guidelines and share practical advice in addition to research outputs (see: High Latitude Drone Ecology Network (co-lead) and ConservationDrones.org (technical director)).

Foraging ecology

I’m broadly interested in how foraging influences behavior, energetics, decision making, social-tradeoffs, and movement ecology (to name a few!). It is a field that allows all of the research interests described above (and many others not touched on) to be linked in theory and data. This interest lurks behind everything that I study. More to come!

Additional publications:
- Gelada feeding ecology in an intact ecosystem at Guassa, Ethiopia: variability over time and implications for theropith and hominin dietary evolution. 2014 American Journal of Physical Anthropology (contributor)
- Death by a thousand huts? Effects of household presence on density and distribution of Mongolian gazelles. 2011 Conservation Letters (contributor)