Research

Experimental Ecology Using Mesocosms

We use controlled experiments to investigate how ecological conditions and species interactions shape aquatic communities. Much of this work takes place in mesocosms—replicated, semi-natural ecosystems that bridge the gap between highly controlled laboratory studies and observational field research. Mesocosms allow us to manipulate factors such as predators, competitors, nutrients, turbidity, and artificial light at night while retaining much of the biological complexity found in natural habitats. We use these experiments to identify ecological mechanisms and understand how responses at the individual level scale up to affect populations and communities.

Colonization Dynamics and Habitat Selection

Many aquatic insects and amphibians actively select the habitats in which they reproduce. These decisions determine how communities assemble. Our research examines how organisms evaluate environmental cues—including predators, competitors, resources, habitat structure, and human-caused environmental change—when choosing breeding habitats. We are particularly interested in the colonization dynamics of amphibians, coleopterans, hemipterans, and mosquitoes. By studying these decisions as they occur, we can connect individual behavior with broader patterns of species distributions, community assembly, and disease-vector abundance.

Amphibian Phenotypic Plasticity and Species Interactions

After organisms colonize a habitat, interactions with predators, competitors, and environmental conditions can alter how they grow, develop, behave, and transition between life stages. We study phenotypic plasticity in amphibians: the ability of a single genotype to produce different traits or life-history outcomes in response to its environment. One important example is facultative paedomorphosis in salamanders, in which some individuals metamorphose and become terrestrial adults while others mature in the water while retaining larval characteristics. This developmental flexibility provides an interesting system for examining how ecological conditions influence individual life histories and, ultimately, evolution.

Experimental Design and Statistics

We combine careful experimental design with statistical modeling to separate ecological signals from natural variation. Our work includes linear and generalized linear models, mixed-effects models for hierarchical and repeated-measures data, multivariate methods for analyzing ecological communities, Bayesian models, and network approaches for studying relationships among species and other interconnected components of ecological systems. We view study design and statistical analysis as inseparable parts of the research process: ecological questions guide decisions about treatments, controls, replication, and sampling, while the structure of the study determines the appropriate model. Integrating design and analysis from the outset allows us to evaluate complex ecological questions while accounting for variation among organisms, habitats, locations, and time.

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