Mima mounds are an unusual landscape topography which occur from Washington through California and were hugely extensive before intensive farming and settlement. Mima mounds are regular undulations of the soil, half a meter or a meter tall (a few feet), three to ten times as wide. Especially in California, Mima mounds usually alternate with vernal pools, micro-ecosystems that support many endemic species of plants and invertebrates.

There are dozens of theories of what built or maintains the Mima mound landscapes. My dissertation research is following up the increasing evidence that fossorial (burrowing) rodents, e.g. pocket gophers, actively maintain Mima mounds. I have hypothesized a feedback between gophers, plants, hydrology, and topography, composed of small-scale, short-term interactions, which spontaneously develops Mima mound topography over decades and millennia.

I am testing this in three ways:

• simulating that region and others in a cellular automaton system;
• closely recording the phenomona involved in one mound-pool region, to test the strength of the small interactions; and
• comparing the simulated results to the recorded extent and patterns of mound-pool topography, to see if the associated edaphic factors hold true.

I am also working on the Harte Lab’s Maximum-Entropy Theory of Ecology project, part of the Berkeley Initiative in Global Change Biology. We are working on a transparent, reproducible, reusable, extensible package for METE analyses.