Research Areas

My research program is broadly concerned with tropical community ecology with a focus on identifying mechanisms important for structuring forest communities and dynamics and how such mechanisms can be used to guide conservation management actions. I am particularly interested in the impacts of anthropogenic pressures including defaunation, invasion and habitat fragmentation on species interactions, communities and ecosystem processes. The goal of my work is to provide novel insights for our understanding of how complex communities and ecosystems work and how they might respond to anthropogenic pressures. My work also touches on the evolutionary and behavioral ecology of mammals and birds and has challenged some long-standing theories in the field, especially as related to primates. I employ a variety of tools to address these research areas including observation, field experiments, large database manipulations, phylogenetic analyses, and modeling which have allowed me to approach questions from different perspectives and at different scales of organization.