About

My research combines original data collected in the field with biodiversity informatics ('big data') and novel quantitative modeling techniques to understand critical ecological questions about organisms. I am most interested in how large-scale anthropogenic drivers of change (e.g., climate change, invasive species, land-use change, fire regimes) affect geographic distributions and community interactions over short (years) to long (centuries) timespans.

Research topics

• Biology
• Ecology
• Geography
• Environmental science
• Physics
• Environmental resource management

Selected publications

• Habitat fragmentation mediates the mechanisms underlying long-term climate-driven thermophilization in birds

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2024

  • Geography
  • Ecology
  • Environmental science

  Climatic warming can shift community composition driven by the colonization-extinction dynamics of species with different thermal preferences; but simultaneously, habitat fragmentation can mediate species' responses to warming. As this potential interactive effect has proven difficult to test empirically, we collected data on birds over 10 years of climate warming in a reservoir subtropical island system that was formed 65 years ago. We investigated how the mechanisms underlying climate-driven directional change in community composition were mediated by habitat fragmentation. We found thermophilization driven by increasing warm-adapted species and decreasing cold-adapted species in terms of trends in colonization rate, extinction rate, occupancy rate and population size. Critically, colonization rates of warm-adapted species increased faster temporally on smaller or less isolated islands; cold-adapted species generally were lost more quickly temporally on closer islands. This provides support for dispersal limitation and microclimate buffering as primary proxies by which habitat fragmentation mediates species range shift. Overall, this study advances our understanding of biodiversity responses to interacting global change drivers.

  DOI

• Reimagine fire science for the anthropocene

  PNAS Nexus · 2022 · 96 citations

  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Environmental resource management

  Fire is an integral component of ecosystems globally and a tool that humans have harnessed for millennia. Altered fire regimes are a fundamental cause and consequence of global change, impacting people and the biophysical systems on which they depend. As part of the newly emerging Anthropocene, marked by human-caused climate change and radical changes to ecosystems, fire danger is increasing, and fires are having increasingly devastating impacts on human health, infrastructure, and ecosystem services. Increasing fire danger is a vexing problem that requires deep transdisciplinary, trans-sector, and inclusive partnerships to address. Here, we outline barriers and opportunities in the next generation of fire science and provide guidance for investment in future research. We synthesize insights needed to better address the long-standing challenges of innovation across disciplines to (i) promote coordinated research efforts; (ii) embrace different ways of knowing and knowledge generation; (iii) promote exploration of fundamental science; (iv) capitalize on the "firehose" of data for societal benefit; and (v) integrate human and natural systems into models across multiple scales. Fire science is thus at a critical transitional moment. We need to shift from observation and modeled representations of varying components of climate, people, vegetation, and fire to more integrative and predictive approaches that support pathways toward mitigating and adapting to our increasingly flammable world, including the utilization of fire for human safety and benefit. Only through overcoming institutional silos and accessing knowledge across diverse communities can we effectively undertake research that improves outcomes in our more fiery future.

  PublisherDOI

• Migratory strategy drives species-level variation in bird sensitivity to vegetation green-up

  Nature Ecology & Evolution · 2021 · 94 citations

  • Geography
  • Ecology
  • Environmental science
  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Chris S. Elphick

  University of Connecticut

  1 shared

• Eliza M. Grames

  University of Nevada, Reno

  1 shared

• Qiang Wu

  Zhejiang University

  1 shared

• Ping Ding

  Guangdong Pharmaceutical University

  1 shared

• Andrew N. Stillman

  Cornell University

  1 shared

• Tinghao Jin

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

• Xingfeng Si

  East China Normal University

  1 shared

• Juan Liu

  Zhejiang University

  1 shared

Labs

• Tingley LabPI

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