Research Overview

My research includes the broad topics of:
  • Defaunation in tropical forests ('defaunation' is a term scientists often use to describe the phenomenon of losing vertebrate wildlife species, primarily those that are large- and medium-bodied)
  • Rewilding
  • Climate change impacts on plant-pollinator interactions and plant fecundity
  • Factors that influence frugivore foraging and seed dispersal services in tropical forests​
  • Tidal marsh ecology and ways to increase these ecosystems' resiliency to sea level rise and other threats [web section under construction - reach out to learn more!]

See below for more information on these topics

Defaunation in tropical forests

Ever-expanding activities of resource extraction by humans, which is in itself is an important and complex topic, are increasingly pervasive in once remote tropical forests as roads that accompany enterprises such as oil extraction and logging facilitate deeper and deeper access into forest interiors. This inherently opens forests up to the loss of wildlife via hunting, habitat loss, and other factors.  Today, this trend is resulting in widespread declines or local extirpations of large- and medium-sized vertebrates (i.e. animals most vulnerable to anthropogenic disturbances and those that are target bushmeat species). This phenomenon is often referred to as 'defaunation' (despite it not referring to several faunal groups, such as insects). Defaunation causes shifts in the abundances of different key vertebrate functional groups, such as seed dispersers and seed predators. The direct and indirect effects of defaunation on ecological and evolutionary processes in tropical forest plant communities are profound and not fully understood. As an NSF postdoctoral fellow, I am currently conducting research in the Ecuadorian Amazon in Yasuní National Park from the Yasuní Research Station and the Tiputini Biodiversity Station to better understand how defaunation is changing the drivers of seed and seedling mortality, with the goal of better understanding if and how the maintenance of plant diversity in tropical systems may be changing as we lose animal species.

My previous work on the topic of defaunation has included:
  • Investigating the effects of hunting in Afrotropical forests in Gabon (Central Africa) to trace ecological cascades in the forest understory (this work is published here in Biological Conservation) 
  • Modeling effects of the loss of endangered frugivores on seed dispersal networks in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (this work is published here in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B)
  • Analyzing the fine-scale spatial genetic structure and genetic diversity of animal-dispersed palm seedlings across a gradient of defaunation and hunting pressure in the Peruvian Amazon in the Madre de Dios river basin (this work is in review in the Journal of Ecology)  

Rewilding

Related to my interest in ecological cascades caused by defaunation, I am also fascinated by the process of rewilding, either via the assisted or unassisted recolonization of previously extirpated species or their functional equivalents. In Southeast Asia, Singapore is a natural experiment in rewilding as the process of 're-greening' the island has inadvertently facilitated recolonization by large vertebrates historically locally extirpated by hunting. How this rewilding process will unfold without natural predators in a human-dominated landscape is still unclear, and there is ongoing investigation into if these recolonizing animals (wild boar, sambar deer, and potentially others) will reinstate lost ecological processes such as dispersal and herbivory.
  • I've published nascent research on this topic here in Conservation Science and Practice
  • To learn more, visit The Ecological Cascades Lab here

Climate change impacts on plant-pollinator networks and plant fecundity

Climate change is disrupting multiple ecological and evolutionary processes in ecosystems around the globe. One aspect of this is the threat of phenological mismatch between plants and their pollinators - that is, a change in the temporal and spatial overlap between pollinating insects and the plant species they've historically foraged on and pollinated. I am interested in using network analysis approaches coupled with field experiments and observations to investigate how plant-pollinator interactions are changing and what this may mean for plant reproductive success in the future. My experience in this work has been led by the Brosi Lab at the University of Washington and Emory University in collaboration with the talented past and present Brosi Lab members. 
  • For this ongoing work, I am leading an in prep publication: Consequences of experimental snowmelt acceleration on plant-pollinator networks and plant fecundity
  • I have participated in multiple other projects that are ongoing in the Brosi Lab, which is continuing this exciting work in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and in the Cascades in Washington (learn more at the lab website here)

Factors that influence frugivore foraging and seed dispersal services in tropical forests

The vast majority of tropical tree species have an incredible mutualism with fruit-eating animals (frugivores) by which the trees produce fleshy fruits that frugivores consume, along with the plant's seeds, which are later deposited away from the parent plant. In this way, tropical species achieve dispersal services and their offspring escape the high densities of plant-enemies associated with the location of the parent plant. This mutualism shapes ecological and genetic patterns in plant communities, and it can be influenced by several factors not fully understood.