Research OverviewMy research focuses on understanding how and why individual variation arises, how it drives patterns and processes across scales, and the effects of changing environments on these relationships.
My research integrates across levels of organization, from physiological mechanism to broad scale pattern, at the interface of ecology and evolution. |
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I seek to understand how individual variation drives emergent properties across biological scales from population growth to species distributions and community diversity.
In collaboration with Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador and Siempre Verde Preserve, we are monitoring growth and survival of trees and tree ferns along elevation transects in a montane forest in Ecuador.
We have investigated the distribution of taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity along the transects. The 10-year re-census of the transects is occurring summer 2024 along with collection of functional trait and environmental data. |
I, along with the Swenson lab, are investigating
community dynamics and re-assembly, following Hurricane Maria, of the El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico. We are assessing how changes to the abiotic and biotic environments post-hurricane affect seedling recruitment, function, and performance. |
I am particularly interested in the underlying drivers of performance variation among individuals, information necessary to explain complex emergent properties.
I have begun addressing this by focusing on multivariate phenotypes and how they lead to variation in growth and survival within and across environments. In a tropical tree community, I found that seedlings combine different traits in multiple ways to achieve similar growth and that trait combinations that led to highest performance changed across light and soil nutrient gradients. |
I want to understand the impacts of changing climate on demographic responses; critical for predicting how emergent properties may change and mitigating climate impacts.
As a postdoc at the University of California, Davis, I am asking how environmental cues drive life history timing and evolution of the germination niche. I am using a combination of controlled and greenhouse experiments, gene expression analyses, and modeling.
I am evaluating relationships between thermal germination traits, germination fractions, and genetic diversity in populations of Streptanthus tortuosus along an elevation gradient. Using the Streptanthus clade of Brassicaceae and its allies, I am investigating how climate change induced shifts in germination cues alter germination timing, flowering phenology, and fitness among closely related species. |