This emerging approach in ecology emphasizes the need to predict the future state of ecosystems, natural capital, and ecosystem services, and, that while ecological systems are complex, there are strategies to improve the skill of ecological models, borrowed from numerical weather forecasting (iterative, near-term confrontation between model predictions and in-coming data) and using hierarchical Bayesian statistics (the ability to fuse different sources of data and characterize uncertainty).
Climate has long been identified as the major determinant of species’ geographic distributions, and from climate-only (“climate-envelope”) models, it is estimated that ~15-35% of species are “committed to extinction” by climate change.
Tree-ring time series data offer a lifelong, annually resolved record of a tree’s growth, making them a valuable source of information on aboveground woody biomass accumulation and hence carbon sequestration in forests.
Two lines of research in my group are aimed at creating useful tools for forest management in the face of changing climate. Courtney Giebink created a climate-sensitive empirical forestry (growth and yield) model using tree-ring data (Giebink et al.
Population Viability Analysis has been called the “flagship technology” of conservation biology (by Michael Soule). Kent Holsinger, Eric Menges, and I collaborated together for some years to develop a novel approach to population viability analysis (PVA): we built a hierarchical Bayesian (hB) model that draws upon data from all parts of the life cycle simultaneously to estimate vital rates and their covariation as a function of time-since-fire and random year effects.
While a post-doctoral fellow at Yale University, I collaborated with Michael Donoghue and Stephen Smith to combine niche models and phylogenies to quantify climatic niche evolution and its role in the diversification of the “bird-cage” evening primroses (Evans et al.
My training as a PhD student was firmly footed in the sort of MacArthurian ecology that focuses at the population and individual scale to ask questions about the selective forces that shape traits and life histories.
My earliest work contributed to basic knowledge, either in terms of demography, reproductive biology, or genetic diversity, of the following rare plants: Asimina obovata (Annonaceae), Cimicifuga elata (Ranunculaceae), Dicerandra frutescens (pictured, photo by Reed Bowman) and D.
An example of using the in-built project page.