RESEARCH

Biodiversity governs the structure and functioning of ecosystems in fundamental ways ranging from the genetic structure of individual populations to the cycling of elements within the biosphere. The ability to understand and predict how biodiversity, and in particular species, respond to environmental change has long been a critical issue for ecologists, managers and policymakers. Studies that explore how ecosystem stability changes with realistic species loss can yield insights into community assembly and food web theory as well as provide a better understanding of how to ensure the reliable provisioning of the ecosystem goods and services upon which society depends.

My current research focuses on how community trophic complexity and functional diversity affects the overall stability of ecosystem-level processes within the community. I am attempting to test my ideas in the natural microcosms of moss-arthropod communities at Black Rock Forest , NY . In laying the groundwork for my dissertation, I am conducting a survey of the abundance, distribution, and diversity of microarthropods found in the dominant moss morphotypes in oak woodlands. I plan to combine both lab and field experiments to explore how human-driven disturbances like nitrogen deposition and climate change affect the dynamics of depauperate arthropod communities at population, community, and ecosystem-level scales. In the past I have investigated how gopher-mediated soil disturbance differentially affects the compositional and functional stability of native and exotic prairie plants at the Cedar Creek LTER site in East Bethel , MN .