Ecology is focused on understanding how organisms interact with each other and their environments, across ecological, spatial, and temporal scales. Thus, understanding how processes and patterns of ecological systems change across space and time is a principle goal for conservation biologist globally. While many approaches exist for investigating the changing...
Ecologists must increasingly balance the need for accurate predictions about how ecosystems will be affected by climate change, against the fact that making such predictions at the ecosystem-level may be infeasible. Although information about responses of individual species to a changing environment is increasing, scaling such information to the community...
Global environmental change is causing local extinctions of species. When species depend on one another, as in the mutualistic relationship between plants and pollinators, loss of one interaction partner may cause cascading effects within the community – such as additional extinctions and reduced pollination services. Network theory provides a way...
The size, shape, and stability of a species’ dietary niche can both influence and reflect a variety of biological patterns, including species interactions, extinction risk, and ecosystem function. This is particularly apparent when dietary changes manifest at ecosystem and clade scales to profoundly affect macroecological and macroevolutionary trajectories. However, many...
Human actions are pushing natural systems into states that have no historical precedent. In response, empirical and theoretical researchers are increasingly focused on developing ways to predict the responses of ecological systems to change. However, significant knowledge gaps remain, often leading to “ecological surprises” where observed impacts of global change...
Many of Earth’s terrestrial large carnivore species are threatened with extinction. As a result, some of the ecological effects associated with these species may be lost. With the goal of furthering large carnivore conservation research, I conduct three global scale analyses involving these species. First, I explore prey depletion as...
Biological invasions and climate change represent two preeminent threats to ecological communities and biodiversity, altering the distribution and abundance of species, disrupting existing species interactions and forming unprecedented ones, and creating novel ecological communities. Many of the most successful invasive species are also ecosystem engineers, species that physically modify the...
The multifaceted role of the environment in regulating the structure and dynamics of biological communities has long fascinated ecologists and motivated much debate and research. Now, in a time of accelerated global changes due to human impacts, the need to understand how the environment shapes communities has gained new urgency....
What makes invasive species successful, and how do they affect native populations and communities? I addressed these key questions in the context of the invasion of Atlantic coral reefs by Pacific red lionfish (Pterois volitans). To assess the role of parasites in contributing to the success of this invasion, I...