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Research
Interests
Opportunities for students
Students interested in
ecology that have quantitative skills needed to participate in research (see
Current Projects), please inquire.
We often have opportunities for students with experience with
programming or scripting languages, advanced statistics, or geographic
information systems and software.
Theoretical
ecology
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Can we
identify population extinction thresholds in terms of habitat,
metapopulation structure, Allee effects, and species life
history?
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How can we optimize resource management
practices to incorporate both economic and ecological
objectives?
Energy
related research
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Hydropower influences on fish
[meta]populations in rivers (storage capability, regulated flows,
population and habitat fragmentation, altered thermal
regimes).
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Effects of
converting agricultural land to grow biomass energy crops on water
quality in rivers and streams.
Research tools
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Population models, ranging from spatially explicit individual-based
population models coupled with hydrodynamic habitat models to
lumped-parameter models that focus on population and metapopulation
dynamics.
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Ecological statistics:
My interests include 1) appropriate treatment of autocorrelation
(spatial, temporal, phylogenetic) in the analysis of ecological
data, 2) non-linear and
hierarchical empirical models, for example to describe ecological
processes subject to limiting factors, 3) functional approaches to
validating or testing ecological models, and 4) sampling design.
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Landscape and river habitat models:
Understanding the influences of human activities often requires
physical models to translate from the activity to the effect on plant
and animal populations. We
often use hydrodynamic and water quality models to bridge this gap.
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