Current Ph.D Research: What will biodiversity look like in the face of change?
My Ph.D research employs cutting-edge computational methods and extensive applications of basic macroecological theory to help understand how biodiversity is structured and how we may expect it to respond to future global change (land use, climate change, etc). In collaboration with Canadian, French, and Finnish institutions, my Ph.D uses large aquatic governmental datasets to tackle several major questions:
1) How do land use effects alter the local and regional drivers similarity/dissimilarity (a.k.a., beta diversity) among stream algae, macroinvertebrate, and fish communities? 2) Does intraspecific spatial aggregation or environmental heterogeneity predict the disconcordance between the shape and evenness of the community-level species abundance distribution (SAD) and the metacommunity/regional-level SAD, or are their relative influences dependent on spatial scale? 3) How are species co-occurrences expected to be shaped by on-going changes in nutrient availability, nutrient ratios, and climate change? How are spatial factors expected to exacerbate or mitigate potential changes in species co-occurrence patterns? 4) Do distributions of species co-occurrence interactions follow power law predictions? Are environmental or spatial patterns responsible for deviations from a power law prediction? Would these deviations reflect decreased or increased ecological resilience? |
Conservation and Ecology of Louisiana Freshwater Crayfish
In addition to my Ph.D. work, I also actively research the ecological drivers of crayfish diversity and community composition in Louisiana alongside researchers from Louisiana State University and Nicholls State University. Louisiana is well-known for their crayfish (locally: crawfish), but interestingly the knowledge available for wild species is sparse. However, this is not a problem limited to only Louisiana species. Globally, there are more than 650+ species of crayfish, with the greatest diversities found in North America and Australia. The southeastern US is a particular hotspot for crayfish diversity. However, the amount of information we still lack on just the basic ecology for nearly all crayfish species is astounding.
I began a collaboration in Spring 2020 with researchers at Nichols State University in Louisiana. Working alongside a Master's student as their committee advisor, we will explore the distributions of wild crayfish species in the Eastern Louisiana parishes, another severely undersampled region of the state. Project goals will achieve a variety of objectives, namely population assessment of several species of state conservation concern, construction of a comprehensive ecological data set that can be publicly used for applied and fundamental ecological questions, and also identification of habitats crucial for crayfish community diversity and population abundance. |
Impacts of Invasive Crayfishes in Michigan
In my post-doctoral research I am working Dr. Brian Roth and the Michigan Department of Natural Resources studying the effects of invasive red swamp crayfish (Procambarus clarkii) in the state of Michigan. This species is not native to the state, and their destructive burrowing behaviors, coupled with their rather aggressive nature, has great ecological and socio-economic consequences. My work focuses heavily on applying numerical and theoretical expertise to improve eradication strategies and control population spread across heavily degraded urban aquatic ecosystems.
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