The focus of my research program is to understand the importance of spatial dynamics to communities and populations, examining ideas that are central to biodiversity maintenance and conservation.

Right now I am exploring these questions:

1. Do traits of beetle species and their short term responses predict their extinction risk after 23 years of habitat fragmentation? Is there an extinction debt? How well does metacommunity theory describe community disassembly? This work is set within the Wog Wog habitat fragmentation experiment in southeastern Australia. The project is funded by NSF. (Collaborators Brett Melbourne, Chris Margules, Mike Austin, Nick Nicholls, Saul Cunningham, Don Driscoll.)
2. How does spatial heterogeneity in the environment affect the invasibility of communities and the risk of extinction of resident native species? (Collaborator Brett Melbourne.)
3. Can we use phylogenetic diversity (a proxy for niche differences between species) to help us understand how native and exotic species coexist? Do different mechanisms operate at different spatial scales? Are heterogeneity in the environment and site productivity important? (Collaborators Jeannine Cavender-Bares, and Marc Cadotte.)

Related projects:

1. I am part of the Beta diversity working group at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis.
2. I am working with Marcel Holyoak and Richard Law to understand how species’ dispersal rates between patches affect the assembly of communities. We are using experiments in protist microcosm communities and patch occupancy models.
3. I am part of NutNet (the Nutrient Network). I am focusing on questions about the roles of heterogeneity in the environment and productivity in the invasibility of grassland communities, examining data from a large number of sites across the globe.