RESEARCH
My work has primarily focused on the impacts of anthropogenic disturbance (like agricultural intensification and deforestation) on species interactions and ecological communities. To this end, I use species interaction networks as a tool to explore the relationship between the many facets of community structure and stability and how this relationship is perturbed by human disturbance. Plant-pollinator interactions are my interactions of choice, but I'm not too picky! My ultimate goal is to understand why communities are affected by disturbance so we can actively restore and conserve species interactions and the vital ecosystem processes they maintain in natural and human-dominated landscapes alike.
Changes in hybrid networks
Plant-pollinator linkage rules
Comparison of antagonistic and mutualistic networks
Deforestation and plant-hummingbird interactions
The bulk of my PhD research focused on constructing the first empirical dataset of plant-pollinator and plant-herbivore interaction networks from across a gradient of agricultural intensification. The gradient spanned natural, non-agricultural habitats, diversified non-industrial farms, to intensively managed monocultures. I call these networks "hybrid" networks because they combined two different interaction types - mutualistic and antagonistic interactions - into a single interconnected network. We found significant changes in hybrid network structure and robustness along the gradient, and developed new metrics for quantifying hybrid network structure.
Being able to predict when and why two species interact is an urgent goal of species interaction research, as the collection of species interaction data is costly and time-consuming. I'm using plant-pollinator networks to understand whether plant traits or plant abundance do a better job at predicting plant-pollinator interactions, and whether this relationship is affected by agricultural intensification.
Mutualistic and antagonistic networks have archetypically distinct network structures, which may translate into distinct responses to the same disturbance. To test this prediction, I'm using data on plant-pollinator and plant-herbivore networks from along a gradient of agricultural intensification to compare changes in network architecture, species turnover, and interaction turnover between the two network types.
Hummingbirds are incredibly important pollinators of tropical plants, but the extent to which deforestation in the tropics is altering hummingbird biodiversity and interaction behavior remains unknown. Using 19 networks of plant-hummingbird interactions collected from along a gradient of deforestation in Costa Rica, we are examining the relationship between amount of forest cover, hummingbird interaction behavior, and whether there is a relationship between hummingbird interaction specialization, morphology, and their success in heavily deforested habitats.
Some of my fearless research assistants!
