Research
Food Webs
Our lab is asking questions about how communities function using food web approaches. The questions we are asking include: What do bats eat in different biomes? What are the effects of environmental disasters (oil spills) on the foraging ecology of terrestrial vertebrates like seaside sparrow and marsh rice rats?
Ecosystem Connections
Aquatic insects and riparian spiders are ubiquitous and abundant invertebrates that occur at the water-land interface. Despite their small size, as aquatic insects move from water to land, they represent a large contribution to ecosystem carbon and nitrogen fluxes, affect food web interactions on land, and alter the composition of plant and animal communities. For the past 5 years we have been using annual insect emergence from rivers in South Africa to elucidate the coupling between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and how those couplings are shaped by anthropogenic stressors.
Conservation
We study the communities of dragonflies and ants in protected areas of Zimbabwe.