How do species interactions maintain biodiversity?
We study how ecological interactions shape the assembly, function, resistance, and recovery of communities—and how those mechanisms can be used to restore biodiversity in human-modified landscapes.
Our work combines field ecology, ecological networks and reproducible data science. Pollinators are a central study system because their interactions connect individual behavior to population persistence, community structure, and ecosystem function.
Current research spans managed forests and post-fire landscapes in the Pacific Northwest, long-term pollinator resurveys in California, high-elevation and Sky Island communities, and comparative analyses of ecological networks.
Community assembly
How do interaction breadth, specialization, partner turnover, and network structure emerge as communities form and change?
Resistance & recovery
How do fire, land use, invasion, and climate alter species interactions, population persistence, and ecological function?
Restoration
Can we design interventions—from floral enhancements to habitat restoration—that rebuild diverse and resilient pollinator communities?
Field ecology meets reproducible data science
We move between natural history, field experiments, long-term observational data, ecological network theory and open computational workflows. That combination lets us ask both why ecological communities are structured as they are and what that structure means when environments change.
