My research interests center around the general theme of how life is organized, in both time and space, over the environmental landscape. My doctoral work explicitly explores how these patterns manifest themselves in the structure and dynamics of ecological communities (food web structure, functional diversity, species-size and species-abundance distributions, phylogenetic relationships, etc ). I used the complex communities that live in and around intermittent pool beds to explore questions about how community organization varies over a complex environmental landscape (moisture, light, temperature, habitat duration, etc). I also looked at the flux of energy and matter flows across ecotonal, or boundary, habitats. You can read more about that project here.

Other work I am involved with explores, in a more mechanistic way, how the feeding relationships of communities are constrained by environmental drivers such as temperature. It appears that temperature, and its interaction with body size, may explain much of the variation in the processes relating to trophic relations observed in nature (eg, handling time, activity, encounter rate between predator and prey, behavioural strategies, consumption rate, filtration rate, digestion rate). Together with Van Savage (Harvard University) we are trying to base these patterns within a solid theoretical framework that we hope will be useful in providing a mechanistic understanding of the ways in which real ecosystems are responding to climate change.

I am also interested in understanding how complex ecosystems naturally assemble over ecological time. Together with another colleague I am using a large empirical dataset to examine how the niche space of a community assembles over time, and to further understand the relationship between the characteristics of successful colonizers and the ecological communities they invade.

The Global Predator-Prey Database (GPPDBase) is an online database of predator-prey observations. It is still in development, but when finished the site can be used to enter details (eg location, habitat, type of predator and prey involved, body size, etc) about any predator-prey interaction that is directly observed. Context dependency of trophic relations (ie, how these relationships vary with environmental context) is one of the main issues facing current food web workers and is something that needs to be undestood. By allowing non-scientists to contribute data, as well as scientists, the GPPDBase massivly increases the time and space over which observations of feeding relationships can be taken. This hopefully will not only result in some fantastic data, but will get the general community involved with contributing to scientific research

I hope to have GPPDBase online by July-August 2008.

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