Research

Research themes

Effects of megafire on insects

The Wog Wog forest fragment experiment was set up back in 1985. Now 30 years later, it's the longest running experiment in temperate forest. The whole site was burned in a megafire in 2020. Funded by NSF, my colleague Kendi Davies (EBIO) and I have been following the population dynamics of hundreds of beetle species for many years before, and now after, the fire. Our work will help managers restore forests impacted by fire. For more on this research, see our beautiful website at wogwog.org.

Spread of invading species

Invasive species are a major economic, environmental and health concern. Species like the cane toad, fire ant, or cheatgrass can transform ecosystems and cost billions of dollars. My colleague Alan Hastings (UC Davis) and I have been using the Tribolium model system to investigate the role of stochasticity in the spatial spread of populations and my colleague Ruth Hufbauer (Colorado State University) and I have been investigating how genetics contributes to this stochasticity. See recent papers in Evol Lett, Proc B, PNAS, and Nature Comms, and previous papers in Nature and Science from this work, funded by NSF.

Evolutionary rescue

When a species is introduced to a new place, the population is in a race against time to evolve to the new environment before it goes extinct. This process is called evolutionary rescue. With funding from NSF, my colleague Ruth Hufbauer (Colorado State University) and I have been using the Tribolium model system together with mathematical models to disentangle the relative contributions of demography and genetics in evolutionary rescue. See our recent paper in Proc B and previous papers in Proc B and PNAS.

Species range limits

For every species, there are limits to where it is found. Understanding what sets range limits and their variability is vital for understanding and forecasting species dynamics. Funded by NSF, and extending our work on single species (above), my colleague Alan Hastings (UC Davis) and I are examining how competition between species interacts with the environment to shape species' ranges. See our recent paper in PNAS.

Scaling up ecological dynamics

A vexing question in ecology is how to predict large scale ecological dynamics from small-scale processes. This is especially important since most of our experimental work in ecology happens in small field plots. Often large-scale outcomes contradict small-scale trends from such field plots. We need to understand why this happens so we can make better predictions. I was fortunate to do my graduate work with Peter Chesson (U. Arizona), who is a leader in this area. The basic theoretical principles underlie most of what I do. Here are two representative papers in the journal Ecology from 2006 and 2016.