Resilience in Gulf Coast songbirds

My research interests broadly center around global change ecology, especially regarding how avian communities respond to climatic and anthropogenic drivers. In my dissertation research I use a combination of community science data, long-term datasets, field studies, and large-scale syntheses to investigate the spatio-temporal responses of avian biodiversity to a selection of environmental variables. I take a multi-scale approach from the level of the individual organism (physiological ecology) to the level of the entire landscape (landscape ecology). In doing so I aim to investigate community-level responses from within a resilience-focused framework, which can provide important insights as to how avian communities may respond to future climate change and land use change scenarios.

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I’m pursuing my PhD in the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Doctoral Program at Texas A&M University (College Station) under the supervision of Dr. Jacquelyn Grace. My research investigates the following questions: How resilient are songbird communities to acute environmental stressors? and, What ecological and evolutionary mechanisms drive heterogeneity in avian resilience across multiple spatial scales? My current work is focused in the southeastern United States, particularly on Gulf Coast songbird communities. 

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Using project eBird, a large semistructured community science dataset, I'm investigating how the resilience and functional diversity of avian communities is affected by changing weather patterns and natural disturbance events at a landscape level in the southeastern United States.

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In the future I aim to continue with the broad theme of my established research, while also incorporating research questions focused on threatened ecosystems around the globe and the socio-ecological drivers of biodiversity conservation in these specific regions.