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RESEARCH

For a more complete list visit my Google Scholar Page

Research: Research

COMMUNITY RESPONSES TO RESOURCES

Along with managing the CoRRE database that was started by Meghan Avolio and Kim Komatsu, I am involved with several research projects using the CoRRE data. Specifically, we are investigating how different long-term pressures are changing the functional and phylogenetic structure of plant communities.

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I am interested in understanding how global changes impact ecosystem functions via changes in plant community structure. I also am considering how plant communities are becoming more similar or dissimilar in trait space when subjected to long-term pressures (co-lead with T. Ohlert).

REPLICABILITY IN ECOLOGY

Several common research practices can lead to low replicability within a discipline. These practices usually come about because of the incentives scientists face foster "exciting" results over credible (and sometimes "boring") results. Inspired by SORTEE and folks in phycology and economics, I am exploring how prevalent some of these practices are in ecology. 

CAUSAL INFERENCE IN ECOLOGY

In ecology, we often want to understand what causes certain ecological phenomena. But, as we all know, correlation does not imply causation. Therefore, ecologists often design experiments to directly manipulate a cause and measure its effect on an outcome. However, what else do we need to think about when making causal claims? Is running an experiment enough all the time? 

PROBING ASSUMPTIONS OF FUNCTIONAL TRAITS

I believe that functional traits can add value to ecology because of their potential to be generalizable across studies. However, we make tons of assumptions about traits. For example, as many other ecologists have pointed out, we can be missing an important aspect of variation when we do not include intraspecific variation of traits. 

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I am interested in understanding more about community weighted means to characterize communities and how we construct other metrics of trait diversity (co-lead with T. Ohlert). I am exploring both of these questions using trait data from several different LTER sites. 

MULTIPLE DRIVERS OF EXTINCTION

Wow. Humans are doing a ton of things to the planet that can potentially make a species go extinct sooner than expected based on background extinction rates. However, most studies only consider one or two drivers of extinction at a time, and the drivers are often big (necessarily so to measure them). But what about a ton of small drivers? What do all of these concurrent and long-lasting driver mean for extinction probabilities?

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