Biodiversity is decreasing worldwide at a rate greater than any of the historic mass extinction events. This makes it imperative to understand the mechanisms maintaining diversity in complex ecological communities. I am interested in the mechanistic basis of diversity maintenance and, in particular, determining whether these mechanisms are stable to atypical environmental changes such as climate warming.

Mathematical models, parameterized with time series and other observational data, not only can quantify the relative contributions of species interactions and environmental change to stable diversity maintenance, but can also predict how existing mechanisms are altered by atypical environmental changes. Most importantly, models that incorporate various combinations of biotic interactions and abiotic environmental changes can serve as initial experiments to explore the robustness of ecosystems to anthropogenically driven perturbations.

I study diversity maintenance mechanisms in the plant-herbivore-predator community inhabiting the East African Savannah. I use long-term census data from the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania as well as my field site at Lake Nakuru National Park in Kenya. This ecosystem is predicted to experience some of the most drastic changes in climate, with increased temperatures and shifting rainfall. Thus, East Africa provides an excellent model system, not only for determining the mechanistic basis of diversity maintenance, but also for understanding how such mechanisms are altered by climate change.

2008: GAANN Fellowship

2008   University of Arizona   BS    Ecology and Evolutionary Biology