Enjoying the company of a Steller's jay at the Hastings Natural History Reserve
I am a terrestrial ecologist broadly interested in the interface between ecology, plant and animal behavior, and their application to conservation strategies. My work often focuses on the role of individual-level behavior or life-history strategies in shaping group-, population-, or community-wide processes.
I use field observations and experiments, as well as quantitative approaches such as remote sensing and agent-based modeling, to address questions about life history strategies of plants and animals. My interests extend from understanding natural history variation in the light of phylogeny to testing theory and developing conservation strategies. While my work often features birds and trees, I have also worked with primates and rodents, and hope to work with many more taxa in the future. Find my publications here.
Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate with Georg Gratzer at the Institute of Forest Ecology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna. The goal of this project is to parametrize stand dynamic models of European old growth forests to determine whether years of intermediate seed production (rather than mast or crop failure years) provide fitness benefits to trees.
Finally, I am a member of MASTNET, an international group of researchers interested in the drivers and consequences of mast-seeding - the synchronized temporal variation of seed production in tree populations. The aim of this group, led by Andrew Hacket-Pain (University of Liverpool) and consisting of leading researchers from around the world, is to assemble and investigate global (time-series) data sets of forest tree seed production.