Principal Investigator
I am a community ecologist who wants to understand how food webs ‘work.’ I am interested in interspecific interactions and how these interactions affect community structure. I seek to design and conduct field experiments testing both basic and applied ecological questions, in collaboration with researchers from a range of fields. I use large-scale geographic surveys in combination with manipulative experiments to document general patterns of plant-animal interactions and answer questions generated by these patterns. My current research includes 1) several different projects related to the effect of predation risk on herbivory rates in the field and community dynamics; 2) collaborative work addressing plant-herbivore interactions (the impact of plant ontogeny on defense against herbivory); and 3) an international collaboration with Chinese researchers into the community ecology of the sweetpotato whitefly.
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