Home
I
am a postdoctoral research associate in
Kathy
Martin's lab at the
Centre
for Applied
Conservation Research in the Department of Forest Sciences
and the
University of British Columbia. I am also affiliated with the
Biodiversity
Research Centre at UBC.
In October 2012, I will join the faculty of the Division of Biology at Kansas State University as an Assistant Professor (see
below for more details).
My
interests span multiple areas of ecology, and have primarily
focused on avian migration systems. In the tropics, I conduct
long-term research in a community of birds living on the Atlantic slope
of Costa Rica with my primary field site being at Rara Avis
reserve. However, as many of the birds I study there make
altitudinal migrations, I have worked along the whole La
Selva -
Braulio Carrillo elevational gradient.
In
the temperate zone, I have worked on Tree Swallows in upstate NY, and
am currently working on both studies of altitudinal migration of birds
in BC as well as a large-scale study of life history variation along
elevational gradients. Please visit my
research pages to
learn more about current, past, and future projects.
Read
more about my research
News
Posted on March 29th,
2012
I'm moving to Kansas!
I'm very pleased to announce that
I've accepted a position as Assistant Professor at
Kansas State University. Our move to the "Little Apple"
(Manhattan, KS) will take place late September. I'm
extremely excited about joining the strong ecology and evolution group
there and making this transition to the next phase of my career.
I will continue to work in both temperate and tropical regions,
and anticipate initiating new projects involving grassland bird and bat
migration. I hope to accept one or two graduate students
interested in pursuing research in my lab beginning the fall 2013.
In
other news, the first of my Tree Swallow papers (collaborative work
with Chris Guglilemo and Dave Winkler) was accepted at Functional
Ecology. Read the lay summary
here.
Posted on January 23rd,
2012
Tropical seed dispersal & phenology paper accepted... finally!
When I started my Ph.D., I thought it was going to be all
about the interactions between migrant frugivores and the plants whose
fruits they consume and seeds they disperse. The ecological and
evolutionary interactions between plants and animals continue to
fascinate me, despite this topic taking a back seat to the migration
questions that ultimately dominated my Ph.D. work and much of my
post-doc work. Nevertheless, alongside studies of the migrations of
tropical birds, I spent a great deal of time and energy trying to
figure out how migrations and species interactions generally influence
the fruiting patterns of tropical plants. This work never did make it
into my Ph.D., but I did eventually write it up, and now, finally, it
is in press.
One of the more unexpected and
interesting aspects of studying the fruiting phenology of tropical
understory plants was the tremendous diversity of phenological patterns
and fruiting strategies exhibited by closely-related species growing in
the same region. We known virtually nothing about the factors leading
to this variation. Temperate plant phenology is so predictable and
boring in comparison with what these tropical plants do! There is much
more to be done in this field.
Posted on December 16th,
2011
New paper just published in Oikos!
Special issue on the ecology and evolution of Partial
Migration
I
was fortunate to be invited to present my work at a symposium
on partial migration last summer in
Lund, Sweden. The paper I presented there was chosen to be published in
a
special
issue of Oikos that came out this month. In it, I
test
a community-level prediction of the Limited Foraging Opportunities
hypothesis--that more altitudinal migrants should show up in lowland
forests in years when the high elevation forests have more severe
rainstorms. The results are consistent with this idea, but
one of
the most interesting results for me, was actually a
surprise. My
analyses show that probably several species we think of as residents on
the Caribbean slope are actually migrants. These are species that breed
in the lowlands, but likely, their numbers during the wet season are
augmented by individuals breeding at higher elevations that move
downslope along with the other altitudinal migrants. Several species of
flycatcher and other small-bodied species fit this category. Read the
full paper
here!
After
the conference, I had a chance to go birding and bird banding. Here's a
photo from just before I fell into the bog, narrowly escaping being the
next bogman of Sweden... I was grabbed at the elbows as I sank
chest-deep!