In June 2011 I began working with the de Valpine group (Perry de Valpine, Jonas Knape, and Katie Scranton) at UC Berkeley’s Environmental Science, Policy, and Management department. Here I am working on developing novel methods to understand time-series data for stage structured organisms. I am using herbivorous spider mites Tetranychus pacificus as a model […] Read more – ‘Stage-structured population dynamics’.
We live in a time where the scientific community is generating information at an unprecedented rate. In the ecological community alone, we now generate a high volume of sensor-derived data in addition to experimental and observational data collected over many decades. While such datasets (and other products of scientific endavours) could be leveraged to generated […] Read more – ‘Open Science’.
For my postdoctoral work at UC Santa Cruz, I modeled the impacts of climate change on the dynamics of the wolf-elk-vegetation food web in the Northern Rockies. I used large datasets from satellite-derived vegetation indices, regional climate models, and weather stations to understand how different trophic levels respond to changing climate. My study is among […] Read more – ‘Climate change impacts on green wave in Yellowstone’.
Predator-prey interactions play an important role in regulating the structure and dynamics of food webs. Other types of natural enemies such as parasites, pathogens and parasitoids also play equally important roles in certain communities but little is known about how dynamics of those interactions differ from ones mediated by predators. For my dissertation I studied […] Read more – ‘The role of microparasites in grassland food webs’.